The Silent War Read online

  A single shot rang out, echoing loudly, and a hole was punched through the Ultramarine’s chest. He collapsed backwards, following the trajectory of the high-velocity sniper round.

  The weight pressing Sor Talgron to the wall fell away, and he pushed himself to his feet. He glanced back towards the conveyor. Loth was down on one knee, smoke drifting from the barrel of his long rifle.

  ‘Good shot,’ he growled. The recon sergeant shrugged.

  Sor Talgron stalked over to the Librarian. The Ultramarine was slumped on the floor, blood pooling beneath him. Sor Talgron didn’t need to be an Apothecary to see that the legionary would not survive.

  ‘Desperation makes fools of us all,’ he said. ‘You didn’t need to break the Nikaea edict. Now, you die a traitor.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ breathed the Ultramarine. ‘But you’ll… die… with…’

  His voice trailed off as his life left him.

  Sor Talgron frowned and turned away. The buzzing in his mind had finally gone, though it had left a pounding headache in his temples. Surprisingly, the flies that the shadow-daemon had breathed forth were all still there, lying dead on their backs with legs folded. They crunched beneath his boots.

  Daemons. These were the new allies of the XVII Legion. Had he not been wearing his helmet he would have spat in disgust.

  He saw two of his legionaries haul aside the wreckage of the Contemptor and help Dark Apostle Jarulek to his feet.

  ‘You’re alive, then,’ Sor Talgron commented, feeling nothing either way.

  ‘Captain, you need to see this,’ said Loth.

  Sor Talgron followed the recon sergeant’s voice, and entered the small communications command centre. It was dominated by sensor arrays and data-screens awash with information.

  ‘What am I seeing?’ he said. He stabbed a finger at one of the screens. ‘Is that what I think it is?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Loth. ‘There’s an active Ultramarines ship up there in orbit.’

  ‘Give me audio on that screen there,’ said Sor Talgron, gesturing to where the image of a woman could be seen speaking.

  ‘–on third bombardment deck,’ the woman was saying as the audio connected to the visual feed. ‘Target solution is a lock. On my mark.’

  ‘It’s preparing to fire,’ said Loth. ‘They’re using this connection to sequence its guidance systems.’

  ‘Kill the connection!’ barked Sor Talgron.

  ‘I’m trying,’ said Loth, punching in keys on the command console. ‘It’s locked me out.’

  The woman on the screen turned to look at the Word Bearers. She was a fleet admiral, Sor Talgron saw by the pins on her lapel. A cold smile touched her thin lips.

  ‘I take it, then, that Legionary Xion Octavion is dead,’ she said. ‘He died a hero. Whatever he did bought the time I needed. You traitors are all going to burn.’

  Sor Talgron cursed and drew his volkite pistol, aiming it squarely in the centre of the command module. Loth stood and backed away, knocking his chair over in his haste.

  The captain fired, emptying the weapon’s charge into the console. The whole thing went up in sparks and flame, and the data-screens exploded.

  Jarulek stood in the doorway, leaning on the supporting arm of a legionary. ‘What can one crippled ship do?’

  ‘There are still Ultramarines forces on this continent,’ said Sor Talgron. ‘They won’t target the battles for fear of killing their own legionaries. They wouldn’t sanction that. It is not in their nature. They’ll be targeting one of the muster points.’

  Loth spat. In the silence that followed, Dal Ahk’s voice crackled through on the vox.

  ‘Captain! Enemy planet-strike ordnance inbound!’ he said. ‘Multiple targets!’

  Ten

  Decimus was bleeding from a dozen wounds, and he clutched a chainaxe in blood-slick hands. He had lost his own weapons – and a number of those scavenged from fallen friends and foes – earlier in the battle. His muscles were burning, and his armour was hanging off him in ragged pieces. One of his lungs was deflated, and his secondary heart was pounding, picking up the slack from his primary heart, which had been pierced by shrapnel. He was aware of more than a dozen internal injuries that required immediate medicae attention.

  He smashed the skull of a traitor beneath the butt of his axe, grimacing in pain as he struck. He tossed the chainaxe aside – it was missing so many teeth that it was little more than a bludgeon. He picked up the crude knife that the enemy legionary had been clutching. It was hot to the touch, and made his hand tingle strangely. Bile rose in his throat. He hurled the cursed blade away.

  ‘Here, my lord,’ said a wounded Ultramarines sergeant, proffering his power sword. The warrior was so drenched in blood that he could have been mistaken for a Word Bearer.

  ‘My thanks, Sergeant Connor,’ he said, and took the blade. He thumbed its activation rune and energy coalesced down its length. ‘Macraggean?’

  The sergeant nodded wearily. ‘From the Crown Mountains themselves.’

  The scream of an incoming artillery shell sent Ultramarines scrambling for cover. Decimus didn’t bother. He could tell from the sound that it was a way off to his left. A hot wind tore across the corpse-strewn plain, and the choking clouds parted momentarily in the backwash of an unseen blast.

  The enemy was coming for them once again, lines of legionaries and Dreadnoughts advancing alongside Vindicators and Predators. There were still thousands of them.

  ‘My lord,’ came a shout. He was too weary even to register who it was that had spoken. ‘My lord, look!’

  Lifting his gaze skyward, Aecus Decimus saw dozens of burning shapes falling through the upper atmosphere. Each was trailing a line of fire. He stood there in the mud and the blood, breathing hard. It was done.

  ‘Reinforcements?’ said one his legionaries, and Decimus felt a pang of shame. He had told no one but his most senior captains and the cadre of censured legionaries of his final order. It was better that way, he had decided.

  There was a ragged cheer from a few of the men, thinking that their Chapter Master had confirmed the arrival of reinforcements. Others knew better, however.

  ‘Those are not drop pods,’ said Sergeant Connor in a low voice that only Decimus heard. ‘Reinforcements are not coming, are they.’ It was not a question.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘This planet is lost, and so are we. But we’ll take all these traitor bastards with us.’

  With the sergeant’s aid, he climbed wearily to stand atop the ruined hulk of a Rhino, and he raised the power sword high for all to see. There were pitifully few of them left, but he saw pride burning in their eyes. Pride, and anger.

  The first of the orbital strikes hit to the north. There was a blinding flash, and rising green flame mushroomed into the air beyond the horizon. The sound would not hit them for almost a minute, the Chapter Master judged. Others were coming down overhead, closer than the first.

  History would not judge him harshly for this, but only because none of the XIII Legion would be left alive here once this was over, none to speak of what he had set in motion. No one would ever question which side had unleashed this horror upon a loyal world of the Five Hundred. The time for doubt was past.

  ‘One last charge, sons of Ultramar,’ he roared. ‘One last charge, in the name of Guilliman and the Emperor.’ He dropped off the Rhino, sinking half to his knees in the clinging mire. ‘Come, my brothers. Honour and glory!’

  ‘Honour and glory!’ they answered as one.

  The struggle did not last long. No contest between an armoured and unarmoured legionary would.

  Sor Talgron caught Volkhar Wreth’s hand in his fist as he stabbed at him. Bones crunched and the knife clattered to the floor. The predicant slammed his fist into the side of Sor Talgron’s helmet, cracking a lens and denting the ceramite.

  ‘That is all you get,
’ said Sor Talgron, the light of his cracked lens flickering.

  He grabbed Wreth by the neck and slammed him bodily into a wall, once, twice, using all his servo-assisted strength. Bricks crumbled around Wreth, and he slumped to his knees. Stepping in close, Sor Talgron slammed a heavy backhand blow into the side of his head, felling him instantly.

  Sor Talgron knelt over him, a knee in the centre of his back pinning him to the ground, and one hand pressing down upon the back of his head. He scooped up Jarulek’s blade with his other hand. The hilt of the athame felt warm to the touch, even through his gauntlet.

  ‘This is my mentor and a warrior who in his day was worthy even of the primarch’s respect,’ growled Sor Talgron. He had the blade of the athame pressed to the back of Volkhar Wreth’s neck. ‘I would not have him suffer needlessly.’

  ‘It will work, captain,’ Jarulek assured him.

  ‘If it does not, I will cut your throat. I promise you that.’

  Then he pushed the knife between Wreth’s vertebrae, cutting into the spinal column.

  The doors were already being eaten away before they arrived at the surface. The temperature in the conveyor had dropped markedly, and a harsh, alchemical stink was seeping through the vents. The lift cable overhead groaned. Sor Talgron wasn’t sure they would make it to the top at all.

  For the enemy to unleash world-killers was a stunning development. It was not a strategic possibility that he had even considered the XIII Legion undertaking.

  ‘This world is going to die, along with countless thousands of the Seventeenth, yet you seem impressed,’ said Jarulek.

  ‘I am,’ said Sor Talgron. ‘I didn’t think they had it in them.’

  He had ordered the evacuation, but there was little chance that more than a fraction of his legionaries had made it off-world before the bombs had struck. Now, the vox was awash with static.

  ‘We should have stayed down there,’ said Jarulek.

  ‘Be silent, priest,’ snapped Sor Talgron. ‘To stay there was a death sentence. We have to get off-world.’

  ‘Look at what they have unleashed!’ snarled Jarulek. A chemical mist was seeping into the carriage, coming in through the vents and the cracks in the door. Tongues of pale flame licked up from where that mist touched bare metal. They reached for Jarulek, drawn to his gesture. ‘You thought it beyond them? This world is going to burn.’

  Sor Talgron turned and shoved Jarulek up against the back wall, hand locked around his throat. ‘Your gods did not foresee this either, priest,’ he said. ‘It seems that we all misjudged just how much the Thirteenth hate us… How far they would go to see us bleed.’

  He gave Jarulek a final shove, and turned away in disgust. It was not only disgust at the Dark Apostle, but everything – what the Legion had become, the weakness inherent in his genes, and his own actions on Terra, to name but a few.

  ‘To step out there is to die,’ said Jarulek. ‘There are other ways, other paths that can be walked. If one knows how.’

  Cold fury rose within Sor Talgron.

  ‘I will not flee like a worm into a hole, leaving my legionaries to die,’ he said, casting a withering glare at Jarulek for a moment before turning his back on him.

  ‘So be it,’ breathed Jarulek.

  The temperature inside the carriage dropped markedly, hoar frost creeping up the walls. A host of shadows and whispers swirled around the Word Bearers.

  When Sor Talgron looked back, Jarulek was gone.

  The conveyor came to a groaning halt. Already the metal was starting to buckle and collapse, being eaten away by the caustic chemical mist.

  The doors opened. Beyond, the world burned.

  Eleven

  Phosphex, Roboute Guilliman would later write, was ‘without a doubt singularly the most deplorable man-manufactured weapon that humanity has ever, to its shame, unleashed upon a living world’.

  An incendiary of the most volatile nature, it had the capacity to burn without oxygen and with next to no fuel source. It was capable of burning underwater – in fact, it set the water itself alight – and would burn through solid rock, through the most fire-hardened ceramite and adamantium, absolutely devastating any carbon-based life that it touched.

  Known variously as the ‘living fire’, ‘crawling death’ and ‘ice-fire’ due to its attraction to movement and sub-zero burning temperature, once unleashed it expanded exponentially, burning everything in its path. It was designed for one purpose – the absolute eradication of life on a world. The taint of its residue was far more enduring even than the most deadly radiation from nuclear fallout and plasma-core exposure, rendering any lands exposed to its touch uninhabitable.

  Not even the Death Guard favoured its use in any but the most extreme circumstances, and even then only on the order of a Legion’s most senior echelons of command. The use of phosphex had only twice been sanctioned for use by the primarch of the XIII Legion, and then only upon isolated regions, but a small number of its most powerful warships held the munitions in their armouries still, for use in extremis.

  Percepton Primus, Chapter Master Decimus had decreed, was such a case.

  A single, man-portable phosphex bomb had the capacity to contaminate the air and soil where it was detonated for a thousand years. Never in Legion history had an entire ship’s payload of phosphex warheads been unleashed in one bombardment. In theoretical simulations, a world that suffered such an attack would never recover.

  In all, twenty-four Mortalis-class atmospheric missiles were launched from the Righteous Fury at the surface of Percepton Primus. All of them struck the planet’s singular super-continent, spread across a dispersal zone ten thousand kilometres wide. Each targeted a key strategic location, the coordinates of which had been uploaded from the communications sub-base within the mountains – Word Bearers extraction points, the city of Massilea, the field of war where the Chapter Master had drawn the enemy legionaries in strength.

  The Righteous Fury was destroyed with all hands three minutes and twenty-seven seconds after the first payload was launched. The XVII Legion cruiser Sanctified claimed the kill.

  By then, the surface of Percepton Primus was already burning.

  It was harder to remove a legionary’s primary heart than one might expect, even one not wearing his armoured plate.

  First there was the black carapace, the tough under-skin membrane that was as hard as guard-issued flak armour and tough enough to stop a solid slug. Once through that, cutting too high would hit the fused ribcage. Trying to hack through that was futile unless you were well-equipped; a Space Marine’s bones were like iron, and their chest was one solid mass.

  The key, Sor Talgron knew, was to come in under the ribcage. A deep, vertical slit just below the breastbone.

  ‘It is a shame that Dorn is sending us away,’ said Jarulek as he cut through flesh and sinew. ‘All the guns of our fleet, sitting up there in the shipyards around Luna, waiting to be unleashed at the most opportune moment. That would have been… delightful.’

  ‘Dorn is no fool,’ said Sor Talgron. ‘We knew this was a possibility, which is why we have our contingencies – the comet, the shipyards, our allies on Mars and such. The charges remain primed, yes?’

  ‘They do,’ said Jarulek. ‘Loth did his job well. When they blow, they’ll think the psychic levees simply overloaded. There will be mayhem. Panic. More importantly, they’ll be blinded – it could take months before they are able to send or receive any astropathic missives beyond the Solar System.’

  ‘Good,’ said Sor Talgron.

  ‘Lord Aurelian will not be pleased that we are being shunted off Terra. If we were still garrisoned here when the final push came…’

  ‘We have done what we can in preparation,’ said Sol Talgron ‘We have used our time here well. And now for our last surprise…’

  Volkhar Wreth lay paralysed and close to death
on his back on the floor, atop a heavy canvas drop sheet stained dark with blood. They had stripped him of the robe he’d been wearing, and his yellow bodyglove had been cut away, baring his heavily muscled body. His skin was slick with gore. He gave a muted groan, his head twitching in agony as Jarulek pushed his hand into the cut in his abdomen, pressing into his body cavity, groping upwards.

  His tongue was gone, torn from his mouth at its root. It lay on the floor, discarded. A length of chain was between his teeth, wrapped around the back of his neck like a gag. Bleeding ruinous symbols were sliced into the meat of his chest, thighs, shoulders and neck; Jarulek had made his flesh a bloody parchment for his work. An eight-pointed star had been carved into his forehead, deep enough to score it upon his skull.

  ‘Was it wise to tell Dorn you were on the comet?’ said Jarulek.

  ‘The best lies have an element of truth to them,’ said Sor Talgron. ‘He would have known if I had spoken false.’

  ‘Was the task complete?’

  ‘No,’ said Sor Talgron, bitterness tinging his words. ‘With Dorn’s return, I had to leave it unfinished. I left a contingent behind with Ibarix to complete the task.’

  Jarulek paused in his bloody work, glancing up at his captain.

  ‘That is a death sentence,’ he said.

  ‘Ibarix volunteered. He will do the Legion proud, when their time comes. Now get on with it. We have been too long already.’

  Jarulek nodded sagely, and focused back on the task at hand.

  ‘I take no pleasure in this defilement,’ Sor Talgron said to Volkhar Wreth. He was standing back, away from the bloody work, arms folded across his chest. ‘This is just a means to an end. You are just another tool in my arsenal, a weapon to be unleashed. The war will come to Terra, and the palace will fall. You’ll be a part of that.’

  The Dark Apostle pulled his bloody arm from within Wreth’s torso. He held the tortured Word Bearer’s primary heart in his hand. It was still pumping, the severed arteries and veins oozing blood with each labouring convulsion. The predicant’s eyes were wide as he stared up at his own still-beating heart. His breathing was coming in short, sharp gasps. His secondary heart would have kicked in by now – a legionary could live, for a time, like this.