There Is Only War Read online

  My second heart finishes its beat. My recollection concludes, as it always does, with the memory of dragging myself into this hole and, even as the bio-poison burned its way around my body, focusing on my training, slowing my mind, suspending my system and halting the poison’s spread. It was too late for me; I know that. I will die when I wake. Pasan, Vitellios, Narro, Hwygir; Cassios had taken them in, but I will carry them out again. I know they are dead, their bodies lost, perhaps more bio-matter for the devourer, but their spirits live on. Two of them in the reductor in my hand, in the progenoid glands of Commander Cassios from which new gene-seed and two new Astartes would arise. And two of them my own shell. The glands in my throat and in my chest that would bear two more. Cassios and I are lost, as we should have been long ago. These four are the future of the Scythes now, and I will live and bear the pain of poison until I deliver them back home.

  ‘Sergeant! Over here!’ the neophyte called.

  Sergeant Quintos, commanding the 121st Salvation Team, strode over to his ward. The neophyte gestured down with his torch into a crevice in the floor of the dead bio-ship. Sergeant Quintos activated the light built into his bionic arm. He had lost the original years before when he himself had been a scout in a Salvation Team. Down there, glinting back in the light, shone the shoulder armour of a Space Marine. And upon that armour was inscribed the legend: TIRESIAS

  Black Dawn

  C L Werner

  Labourers bustled about the busy star port of Izo Primaris, capital city of Vulscus. Soldiers of the Merchant Guild observed the workers with a wary eye and a ready grip on the lasguns they carried. Hungry men from across Vulscus were drawn to the walled city of Izo Primaris seeking a better life. What they discovered was a cadre of guilds and cartels who maintained an iron fist upon all commerce in the city. There was work to be had, but only at the wages set by the cadre. The Merchant Guild went to draconian extremes to ensure none of their workers tried to augment their miserable earnings by prying into the crates offloaded from off-world ships.

  As a heavy loading servitor trundled away from the steel crates it had unloaded, a different sort of violation of the star port’s custom was unfolding. Only minutes before the steel boxes had rested inside the hold of a sleek galiot. The sinister-looking black-hulled freighter had landed upon Vulscus hours before, its master, the rogue trader Zweig Barcelo, having quickly departed the star port to seek an audience with the planetary governor.

  Behind him, Zweig had left his cargo, admonishing the Conservator of the port to take special care unloading the crates and keeping people away from them. He had made it clear that the Guilders would be most unhappy if they were denied the chance to bid upon the goods he had brought into the Vulscus system.

  Most of the crates the servitors offloaded from the galiot indeed held an exotic menagerie of off-world goods. One, however, held an entirely different cargo.

  A small flash of light, a thin wisp of smoke and a round section of the steel crate fell from the side of the metal box. Only a few centimetres in size, the piece of steel struck the tarmac with little more noise than a coin falling from the pocket of a careless labourer. The little hole in the side of the crate was not empty for long. A slender stick-like length of bronze emerged from the opening, bending in half upon a tiny pivot as it cleared the edges of the hole. From the tip of the instrument, an iris slid open, exposing a multifaceted crystalline optic sensor. Held upright against the side of the box, the stick-like instrument slowly pivoted, searching the area for any observers.

  Its inspection completed, the compact view scope was withdrawn back into the hole as quickly as it had materialised. Soon the opposite side of the steel crate began to spit sparks and thin streams of smoke. Molten lines of superheated metal disfigured the face of the box as the cargo within cut through the heavy steel. Each precise cut converged upon the others, forming a door-like pattern. Unlike the small round spy hole, the square carved from the opposite side of the crate was not allowed to crash to the ground. Instead, powerful hands gripped the cut section at each corner, fingers encased in ceramite immune to the glowing heat of the burned metal. The section was withdrawn into the crate, vanishing without trace into the shadowy interior.

  Almost as soon as the opening was finished, a burly figure stalked away from the crate, his outline obscured by the shifting hues of the camo-cloak draped about his body. The man moved with unsettling grace and military precision despite the heavy carapace armour he wore beneath his cloak. In his hands, he held a thin, narrow-muzzled rifle devoid of either stock or magazine. He kept one finger coiled about the trigger of his rifle as he swept across the tarmac, shifting between the shadows.

  Brother-Sergeant Carius paused as a team of labourers and their Guild wardens passed near the stack of crates he had concealed himself behind. The single organic eye remaining in his scarred face locked upon the leader of the wardens, watching him carefully. If any of the workers or their guards spotted him, they would get their orders from this man. Therefore the warden would be the first to die if it came to a fight.

  A soft hiss rose from Carius’s rifle, long wires projecting outwards from the back of the gun’s scope. The Scout-sergeant shifted his head slightly so that the wires could connect with the mechanical optic that had replaced his missing eye. As the wires inserted themselves into his head, Carius found his mind racing with the feed from his rifle’s scope, a constantly updating sequence indicating potential targets, distance, obstructions and estimated velocity.

  Carius ignored the feed from his rifle and concentrated upon his own senses instead. The rifle could tell him how to shoot, but it couldn’t calculate when. The Scout-sergeant would need to watch for that moment when stealth would give way to violence. There were ten targets in all. He estimated he could put them down in three seconds. He didn’t want it to come to that. There was just a chance one of them might be able to scream before death silenced him.

  The work crew rounded a corner and Carius shook his head to one side, ending the feed from his rifle and inducing the wires to retract back into the scope. He rose from the crouch he had assumed and gestured with his fingers to the shadows around him. Other Scouts rushed from the darkness, following the unspoken commands their sergeant had given them. Three of them formed a defensive perimeter, watching for any other workers who might stray into this quadrant of the star port. The other six assaulted the ferrocrete wall of the storage facility, employing the lowest setting of the melta-axes they had used to silently cut through the side of the cargo crate.

  Carius watched his men work. The ferrocrete would take longer to cut through than the steel crate, but the knife-like melta-blades would eventually open the wall as easily as the box. The Scout Marines would then be loosed upon Izo Primaris proper.

  Then their real work would begin.

  Mattias held a gloved hand to his chin and watched through lidded eyes as the flamboyant off-worlder was led into the conference hall. The governor of Vulscus and the satellite settlements scattered throughout the Boras system adopted a manner of aloof disdain mixed with amused tolerance. He felt it was the proper display of emotion for a man entrusted with the stewardship of seven billion souls and the industry of an entire world.

  Governor Mattias didn’t feel either aloof or amused, however. The off-worlder wasn’t some simple tramp merchant looking to establish trade on Vulscus or a wealthy pilgrim come to pay homage to the relic enshrined within the chapel of the governor’s palace.

  Zweig, the man called himself, a rogue trader with a charter going back almost to the days of the Heresy itself. The man’s charter put him above all authority short of the Inquisition and the High Lords of Terra themselves. For most of his adult life, Mattias had been absolute ruler of Vulscus and her outlying satellites. It upset him greatly to know a man whose execution he couldn’t order was at large upon his world.

  The rogue trader made a garish sight in the dark, gothic at
mosphere of the conference hall. Zweig’s tunic was fashioned from a bolt of cloth so vibrant it seemed to glow with an inner light of its own, like the radioactive grin of a mutant sump-ghoul. His vest was a gaudy swirl of crimson velvet, vented by crosswise slashes in a seemingly random pattern. The hologlobes levitating beneath the hall’s vaulted ceiling reflected wildly from the synthetic diamonds that marched along the breast of the trader’s vest. Zweig’s breeches were of chuff-silk, of nearly transparent thinness and clinging to his body more tightly than the gloves Mattias wore. Rough, grox-hide boots completed the gauche exhibition, looking like something that might have been confiscated from an ork pirate. The governor winced every time the ugly boots stepped upon the rich ihl-rugs which covered the marble floors of his hall. He could almost see the psycho-reactive cloth sickening from the crude footwear grinding into its fibres.

  Zweig strode boldly between the polished obsidian columns and the hanging nests of niktiro birds that flanked the conference hall, ignoring the crimson-clad Vulscun excubitors who glowered at him as he passed. Mattias was tempted to have one of his soldiers put a shaft of las-light through the pompous off-worlder’s knee, but the very air of arrogance the rogue trader displayed made him reconsider the wisdom of such action. It would be best to learn the reason for Zweig’s bravado. A rogue trader didn’t live long trusting that his charter would shield him from harm on every backwater world he visited. The Imperium was a big place and it might take a long time for news of his demise to reach anyone with the authority to do anything about it.

  The rogue trader bowed deeply before Mattias’s table, the blue mohawk into which his hair had been waxed nearly brushing across the ihl-rugs. When he rose from his bow, the vacuous grin was back on his face, pearly teeth gleaming behind his dusky lips.

  ‘The Emperor’s holy blessing upon the House of Mattias and all his fortune, may his herds be fruitful and his children prodigious. May his enterprise flourish and his fields never fall before the waning star,’ Zweig said, continuing the stilted, antiquated form of address that was still practised in only the most remote and forgotten corners of the segmentum. The governor bristled under the formal salutation, unable to decide if Zweig was using the archaic greeting because he thought Vulscus was such an isolated backwater as to still employ it or because he wanted to subtly insult Mattias.

  ‘You may dispense with the formality,’ Mattias cut off Zweig’s address with an annoyed flick of his hand. ‘I know who you are, and you know who I am. More importantly, we each know what the other is.’ Mattias’s sharp, mask-like face pulled back in a thin smile. ‘I am a busy man, with little time for idle chatter. Your charter ensures you an audience with the governor of any world upon which your custom takes you.’ He spat the words from his tongue as though each had the taste of sour-glass upon them. ‘I, however, will decide how long that audience will be.’

  Zweig bowed again, a bit more shallowly than his first obeisance before the governor. ‘I shall ensure that I do not waste his lordship’s time,’ he said. He glanced about the conference hall, his eyes lingering on the twin ranks of excubitors. He stared more closely at the fat-faced ministers seated around Mattias at the table. ‘However, I do wonder if what I have to say should be shared with other ears.’

  Mattias’s face turned a little pale when he heard Zweig speak. Of course the rogue trader had been scanned for weapons before being allowed into the governor’s palace, but there was always the chance of something too exotic for the scanners to recognise. He had heard stories about jokaero digi-weapons that were small enough to be concealed in a synthetic finger and deadly enough to burn through armaplas in the blink of an eye.

  ‘I run an impeccable administration,’ Mattias said, trying to keep any hint of suspicion out of his tone. ‘I have no secrets from my ministers, or my people.’

  Zweig shrugged as he heard the outrageous claim, but didn’t challenge Mattias’s claim of transparency. ‘News of the recent… fortunes… of Vulscus has travelled far. Perhaps farther than even you intended, your lordship.’

  An excited murmur spread among the ministers, but a gesture from Mattias silenced his functionaries.

  ‘Both the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Ecclesiarchy have examined the relic,’ Mattias told Zweig. ‘They are convinced of its authenticity. Not that their word was needed. You only have to be in the relic’s presence to feel the aura of power that surrounds it.’

  ‘The bolt pistol of Roboute Guilliman himself,’ Zweig said, a trace of awe slipping past his pompous demeanour. ‘A weapon wielded by one of the holy primarchs, son of the God-Emperor Himself!’

  ‘Vulscus is blessed to have such a relic entrusted to her care,’ Mattias said. ‘The relic was unearthed by labourers laying the foundation for a new promethium refinery in the Hizzak quarter of Izo Secundus, our oldest city. All Vulscuns proudly remember that it was there the primarch led his Adeptus Astartes in the final battle against the heretical Baron Unfirth during the Great Crusade, ending generations of tyranny and bringing our world into the light of the Imperium.’

  Zweig nodded his head in sombre acknowledgement of Mattias’s statement. ‘My… benefactors… are aware of the relic and the prosperity it will surely bestow upon Vulscus. It is for that reason they… contracted me… to serve as their agent.’

  The rogue trader reached to his vest, hesitating as some of the excubitors raised their weapons. A nod of the governor’s head gave Zweig permission to continue. Carefully he removed a flat disc of adamantium from a pocket inside his vest. Wax seals affixed a riotous array of orisons, declarations and endowments to the disc, but it was the sigil embossed upon the metal itself that instantly arrested the attention of Mattias and his ministers. It was the heraldic symbol of House Heraclius, one of the most powerful of the Navis Nobilite families in the segmentum.

  ‘I am here on behalf of Novator Priskos,’ Zweig announced. ‘House Heraclius is anxious to strengthen its dominance over the other Great Families sanctioned to transport custom in this sector. The novator has empowered me to treat with the governor of Vulscus to secure exclusive rights to the transportation of pilgrims to view your sacred relic. The agreement would preclude allowing any vessel without a Navigator from House Heraclius to land on your world.’

  There was no need for Mattias to silence his ministers this time. The very magnitude of Zweig’s announcement had already done that. Every man in the conference hall knew the traffic of pilgrims to their world would be tremendous. Other worlds had built entire cathedral cities to house lesser relics from the Great Crusade and to accommodate the vast numbers of pilgrims who journeyed across the stars to pay homage to such trifles as a cast-off boot worn by the first ecclesiarch and a dented copper flagon once used by the primarch Leman Russ. The multitudes that would descend upon Vulscus to see a relic of such import as the actual weapon of Roboute Guilliman himself would be staggering. To give a single Navigator House a monopoly on that traffic went beyond a simple concession. The phrase ‘kingmaker’ flashed through the governor’s mind.

  ‘I will need to confer with the full Vulscun planetary council,’ Mattias said when he was able to find his voice. House Heraclius would be a dangerous enemy to make, but conceding to its request would not sit well with the other Navigators. The governor knew there was no good choice to make, so he would prefer to allow the planetary council to consider the matter – and take blame for the consequences when they came.

  Zweig reached into his pocket again, removing an ancient chronometer. He made a show of sliding its cover away and studying the phased crystal display. Slowly, he nodded his head. ‘Assemble the leaders of your world, governor. I can allow you time to discuss your decision. Novator Priskos is a patient… man. He would, however, expect me to be present for your deliberations to ensure that a strong case is made for House Heraclius being granted this concession.’

  Mattias scowled as Zweig fixed him with that ingratiating smile of his. Th
e governor didn’t appreciate people who could make him squirm.

  ‘That which serves the glory of the God-Emperor is just and will endure. That which harms the Imperium built by His children is false and shall be purged by flame and sword. With burning hearts and cool heads, we shall overcome that which has offended the Emperor’s will. Our victory is ordained. Our victory is ensured by our faith in the Emperor.’

  The words rang out through the ancient, ornate chapel, broadcast from the vox-casters built into the skull-like helm of Chaplain Valac, repeated by the speakers built into the stone cherubs and gargoyles that leaned down from the immense basalt columns that supported the stained plexiglass ceiling far overhead. Stars shone through the vibrant roof, casting celestial shadows across the throng gathered within the massive temple.

  Each of the men who listened to Valac’s words was a giant, even the smallest of their number over two metres in height. Every one of the giants was encased in a heavy suit of ceramite armour. The bulky armour was painted a dull green, dappled with blacks and browns to form a camouflaged pattern. Only the right pauldron was not covered in the patchwork series of splotches or concealed by fabric strips of scrim. The thick plate of armour above the right shoulder of each giant bore a simple field of olive green broken by a pair of crossed swords in black. It was a symbol that had announced doom upon a thousand worlds. It was the mark of the Adeptus Astartes, the heraldry of the Chapter of Space Marines called the Emperor’s Warbringers.

  ‘This day I remind the Fifth Company of its duty,’ Valac continued, his armoured bulk pacing before the golden aquila looming above the chapel’s altar. Unlike the rest of the Warbringers, who had removed their helms when they entered the holy shrine, the Chaplain kept his visage locked behind his skull-like mask of ceramite. He alone had not covered his armour in camouflage, his power armour retaining its grim black colouration.