Scorched Earth Read online

  A gobbet of monofilament spat from the fluted muzzle of a webber, expanding into a net of lethal, glistening crystal. Instinct, flaring hot nerve endings, made Haukspeer struggle as he was pinned by the web. Any infinitesimal movement, breathing, a muscle spasm, even blinking, would make the web contract. Suffocation through extreme pressure on the lungs and larynx would usually kill the victim, but Haukspeer was a legionary and his fortitude transcended that of a mortal man. His fate was the razor edges of the net, its savage teeth so sharp, so narrow that they were invisible to the naked eye, even if their effects were not.

  I averted my gaze as the Raven Guard was denatured in his armour, only dimly aware I was still firing and my bolter had just chanked empty. Its abrupt silence was filled instantly with the last of Haukspeer's screaming. I thought I heard defiance and rage in his last cry, and took a measure of selfish pride in that.

  Tossing my useless bolter aside, I drew my chainblade. 'Come here, you bastard…'

  Turning slowly, framed in the ambient light from the gaping hole in the roof, the blind-hunter fixed its red lamps on me. Twin battle-claws extended from beneath its torso, unfolding with a strange, syncopated motion. It snapped each of its pincers once, racking its shoulder mounts back to a dormant position as it recognised an easy kill.

  I had never seen malice expressed by a machine before. Not until that moment.

  The short bleat from its harrowing-horn purred almost like a sadistic laugh.

  'Vulkan's fire beats in my breast…' I began, preparing to make my stand as the last of the dark sand ran out.

  A sharp whine from above made me squint, hurting my ears even inside the relative protection of my helmet. There was a brief flash, like a nova flare, before a beam of coruscating energy lanced the blind-hunter square in the torso. Light pierced metal, terrible and penetrating. Unstoppable.

  The purr became a hacking, vibrating cough as the hunter twisted against the beam's impact. Shoulder mounts swung desperately into position, darting back and forth in search of an aggressor, but it was too late. The blind-hunter's organic components were dead, or close to death. Its legs buckled, torso smouldering from the wound.

  I heard a low hum of a capacitor building back up to power before a second beam strafed the shadows, clipping the hunter's nose cone and burning off its nasal pits. I located the firer; a legionary silhouette, legs braced with a shoulder-slung cannon. The beam came from the weapon he carried, and though it flickered with intermittent energy it was potent. Armour that had defied my bolter's shells capitulated against the conversion beamer, and in that moment of revelation I knew the identity of my saviour.

  As the hunter finally slumped into a ruin of sundered metal and scorched organic matter, the legionary put up his cannon and called down to me. His voice resonated around the debris-strewn chamber, and was made colder, more mechanistic for that.

  'Are you injured, brother?'

  'No, Ironwrought,' I replied to Erasmus Ruuman, 'but Haukspeer is dead.'

  Ruuman paused as if weighing up the appropriate response.

  In the end his choice was fitting.

  'That is a great loss to his Legion.'

  'He died with honour,' I said, but deliberately did not look at the remains of Haukspeer's corpse. By now the razor web would have made a mess of him. There would be little to see and I had no desire to remember a noble warrior and friend that way.

  'Don't come down here,' I warned Ruuman. 'Footing is treacherous. Many of the slain died poor deaths in here, brother.'

  'I have bio-scanned the ship,' the Ironwrought replied, 'and detected a single additional life sign, but it's weak.'

  'As did we. I'm going to him now.'

  'Very well. I'll cross via the roof,' said Ruuman. 'Meet me at the exit to the troop hold.'

  'What exit?' Since being in the drop-ship I had yet to see one.

  'It's a gaping tear in the hull. You'll know it when you see it.'

  I was about to head out, back into the dark where I hoped Usabius and my primarch were waiting, when I glanced up.

  'Ruuman, I don't know how and why you got here but I am in your debt for saving my life.'

  'I'll explain on the other side of the ship,' the Ironwrought replied, and then he was gone from my sight.

  Heart pounding, as much from anticipation as adrenaline, I rushed back through the ship to the corridor where we had found the survivor.

  'I hope you are soaring free now, my friend,' I muttered to the shadows as I left.

  Usabius was not there. He had moved off somewhere else, and was no longer waiting. The booted feet of the survivor were, but my battle-brother was absent. For a moment I considered the worst had happened, that Usabius was dead and the survivor as well. A brief vision filled my mind of the blind-hunter killing them first before it caught up to us. Not that it had had enough time to do that, but my senses were not entirely reliable of late. Perhaps it was longer than I had originally thought. Panic overtaking my limbs, filling them with nervous energy, I ran.

  Only when I closed on the survivor did I check myself, slow and finally stop.

  It was not Vulkan. It was not even a Salamander.

  Armoured in magenta with a broken aquila adorning his breastplate, the survivor was not even an ally.

  Slumped against the half-crushed confines of a detention cell wall, flecked with his own blood, was one of Fulgrim's sons. Emperor's Children. A prisoner. My enemy.

  Usabius must have seen him too, and hope kindled that he still lived.

  My enemy groaned. His booted feet were moving but only attached to his torso by the scantest of threads. Most of his left side was crushed too, the armour dented and split. Fulgrim's warriors were slaves to perfection, and as I listened to the one before me groan I wondered if it was not pain but the fact that he was in such poor condition that ailed him.

  'Who are you?' I demanded, approaching slowly with my chainblade out in front.

  An eye opened. Just one; the other was bruised shut. The Emperor's Children legionary turned his head, an agonising motion I assumed but he appeared to revel in it.

  'Salamander…?' he rasped, smiling through red-rimmed teeth. 'Is your kind still alive?' He found that amusing until I crouched down to his level and smashed my fist into his plastron. It was a light blow, I did not want to kill him yet, but fresh cracks still webbed the mocking eagle device he wore.

  'Answer the question, traitor,' I growled, trying to remain calm.

  Spitting up a gobbet of blood, the warrior drew in enough breath to speak.

  'Lorimarr.'

  He attempted to laugh but pulled up short as a hacking cough took over. Blood spittle flecked the ruins of his plastron but could barely be discerned amongst the rest of the damage.

  'Where is Usabius?' I asked, stepping closer, acutely aware of Ruuman's heavy footfalls on the roof overhead.

  'Who?' Lorimarr asked. 'You are the first soul I have seen.'

  'Don't lie to me.' I wanted to give him a taste of my blade but saw the futility of torture at once. This cur would only enjoy it. 'The warrior I came into this ship with, another Salamander like me. Where is he?'

  'There was no one else before you.'

  'Liar!' I brandished my blade, let him see the chained teeth and imagine them ripping into his flesh. If it would yield the truth, I would maim the traitor just as he had maimed countless numbers of my battle-brothers.

  Lorimarr forced a chuckle, undermining my menace. 'What can you do except kill me?' he said. 'No blade will loosen my tongue. There is nothing left to threaten me with. Besides,' he added, growing serious, 'I am not lying. You are the first soul I've seen,' he repeated, a slight smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, 'but not that I've heard. They died slow, your kin… crying out for their father.'

  My patience at its limit, I was about to strike him and end his miserable life when a voice said, 'Brother.'

  I turned and at the end of the corridor I saw Usabius shrouded in shadow.

  '
I thought you were de—'

  'This way,' he said sombrely and walked off as if to lead me.

  Lorimarr followed my gaze into the darkness and when he looked back at me started to laugh uncontrollably.

  'Delicious,' he wheezed through his tears, his pain and his pleasure. 'Exquisite.' His mania was killing him, but I doubted that he cared.

  I ignored the wretch, and went after Usabius.

  Ruuman was right about the exit to the troop hold, but when I passed through the ragged portal he was not there to meet me. Instead I saw Usabius, waiting less than fifty metres from the drop-ship.

  He was standing stock still with his back to me, and looking at something lodged in the dark sand.

  As I approached him, I tried to block out the insane laughter echoing from inside the drop-ship, willing Lorimarr to die at the same time.

  'I wanted to kill him too,' Usabius told me, the edges of something in front of him just coming into view over his shoulder.

  'Why didn't you?' I asked, realising I was looking at a battle-helm partially buried in the Isstvan earth.

  'Because I found this.'

  Ornate beyond reckoning, so finely and perfectly crafted it brought tears to my eyes just to see it, I realised what it was that had enraptured my brother.

  Before us lay the battle-helm of a primarch, the battle-helm of Vulkan.

  For a brief, macabre moment I hoped there would not be a head inside it, but as I stooped to retrieve it, I realised there was no blood, no evidence of injury of any kind or even a struggle.

  It was just a beautiful battle-helm, lying incongruously, discarded in the dirt.

  My fingers trembled as I went to touch it, and I could almost feel the resonance of my father emanating from its very fire-tempered metal. Vulkan's hands had crafted this piece of armour and a measure of his presence and power still imbued it. I saw a face in its fearsomely wrought visage, in the gem-like retinal lenses, the gilded maw, the flat snout. It was Vulkan's, the face I had seen him wear on the battlefield time and again, his war face, and it chilled me to look upon it now, empty of life. Though it must have been lying in the sand for many hours, even days, the helmet was still warm as if it had just been fresh-forged. Even through the ceramite of my gauntlet, I felt its heat. It banished the cold and I took strength from it.

  Mild despair followed in the wake of my initial elation. As I carefully mag-locked Vulkan's war-helm to my belt, I realised why Usabius had not picked it up.

  Rising, I said, 'Our primarch would not have left his battle-helm here willingly. And if his body is not here, and there is no evidence of his death then…' I turned.

  'Then he has been captured by the enemy and is somewhere else,' Usabius concluded.

  'How will we find him?'

  The slow shake of Usabius's head only increased my sense of defeat.

  'I don't know, Ra'stan. The drop-ship was our compass. Without it, we have no bearing, nothing to guide us. Without it, we are…'

  'Lost, brother,' I told him.

  Ruuman announced his presence with the clank of his heavy footfalls on the roof of the drop-ship. The Ironwrought had taken his time. When I saw the magnoculars in his hand, I realised why.

  'Traitors are moving,' he said, his iron voice ringing across the space between us. 'Purgatory is destroyed.'

  My jaw stiffened as I clenched my teeth.

  What was left to us now except for petty retribution?

  'We have one of them inside the ship,' I said, my meaning obvious.

  Ruuman's gaze shifted down a fraction as he saw the battle-helm clamped to my belt.

  'I think vengeance would be understandable.' The Ironwrought nodded, as if in approval of what I had decided to do. 'Be quick with it,' he added, turning away. 'I will keep a watch.'

  With Usabius behind me, I stalked back to the ship.

  Lorimarr was waiting for us. He rested his head against the back of his broken cell, pieces of his shattered plastron rising and falling with the legionary's shallow breathing.

  'I am dead anyway,' he hissed to the darkness, not bothering to open his eye this time. Blood was eking from the left corner of his mouth, so too from his nose and ear.

  I wanted to destroy him, to exact some measure of pain from this traitor as if it would account for all the death and agony he and his kind had inflicted upon us. Perhaps if we had still been in the valley of bones, I would have, but the killing rage was gone and only pity and self-pity remained.

  'But you are in far greater agony than me,' said Lorimarr, opening his eye to stare at me and then the battle-helm I carried, 'aren't you, Salamander?'

  I wanted to smack the supercilious smile off his face.

  'Kill him,' said Usabius.

  'In cold blood?' I replied, my wrath ebbing. 'We would be no better than them.'

  Lorimarr laughed again.

  'You really are broken, aren't you?' he said to me.

  I glared down at him disdainfully, 'I think you are the one smashed up, absent your legs, brother.'

  Snorting derisively, Lorimarr replied, 'I know.'

  'What?'

  The traitor's eye narrowed. 'I know,' he repeated.

  'Speak plainly,' I warned him.

  'What you seek,' he said.

  'Kill him, right now!' Usabius snarled.

  I turned to him, 'Wait! Just wait…' before looking back at our prisoner. I showed him the battle-helm. 'This? Is this what you mean?'

  Lorimarr inclined his head, ever so slowly.

  I sneered, fighting down hope and revulsion in the same ambivalent emotional cocktail.

  'Why would you help us?'

  'He's lying,' Usabius insisted and took a forward step when I put up my arm to stop him advancing further.

  'Wait.'

  I turned my attention back to Lorimarr, crouching down at his eye level.

  'No,' I said, reading the cruelty there, 'he isn't. You want us to go after him. You want to give us hope.'

  'It is false, brother!'

  I shrugged off Usabius's hand on my shoulder, watching Lorimarr's eye flick back and forth between us, his smile broadening as it did so.

  'Tell me,' I demanded. 'I'll make it quick.'

  'You have nothing to offer me, Salamander. But I will give you a gift… He grunted, leaning forward and reaching out with his hand.

  I flinched, suspecting an attack, but saw that the Emperor's Children warrior was unarmed and missing two fingers. He stretched towards me with the remaining digits as if about to perform some kind of benediction.

  'Don't let him touch you!' Usabius snapped, but I was already leaning in, closing my eyes…

  Too late, I realised the danger I was in.

  Lorimarr was a psyker and I a slave to his malicious will.

  As his fingers touched my battle-helm, just the lightest caress of metal against metal, I was bombarded with a host of painful images.

  Fire… An endless conflagration and the destruction of a hundred battle tanks.

  A roar of anger, a curse spat from a primarch's lips in accusation of a brother.

  Pain and light, so hot it seared the very flesh off my skeleton and turned my bones to ash.

  I pulled away from Lorimarr's touch, my ears ringing and a trickle of blood seeping from the corner of my mouth. I wiped it away, about to kill the traitor when I saw that the Emperor's Children legionary's eye was open and unblinking. In his last act of attempted murder, he had ended himself.

  'Ra'stan…'

  The voice sounded dim, the edges of my sight still hazed, and odd after-images related to my earlier visions assailed me like pieces of a broken kaleidoscope.

  'Ra'stan, are you hurt?'

  Usabius was holding me up. Without his intervention I would have fallen, such was the intensity of Lorimarr's psychic assault.

  I nodded, my senses returning.

  'He tried to kill you,' he added, letting me go so I could support myself.

  'A Librarian…'

  'More like
a sorcerer, I think, but yes.'

  'I should not have survived that attack,' I said, facing my brother. 'How could I?'

  'I don't know, but you did. Vulkan protects even his wayward sons.'

  'So we might carry on with our mission?'

  I did not believe that, but decided not to question the distant providence that had kept me alive. For now, it was enough to know that Lorimarr had been thwarted and he was left for whatever carrion feeders haunted the skies of this place.

  'I saw something,' I told Usabius as the two of us stood before the slumped body of the traitor. 'I suspect it was a fragment of what this legionary knew.'

  'Beware such falsehoods, Ra'stan, especially when given by a deceitful messenger.'

  'It did not feel false. I don't think he meant for me to see it. I think he was telling the truth.'

  Ruuman's booted feet hammering on the roof above us returned, cutting our debate short.

  Usabius gave me a warning look, but I was convinced.

  'I know, brother,' I whispered, as if to speak it louder would make the visions disappear, their lodestar blink out.

  With the clank of his heavy armour, the Ironwrought jumped down from the roof of the drop-ship and landed with his back to me. He arose swiftly, bionics whirring, and fixed me with a hard glare as he turned.

  'We're out of time. The war party is coming back, sky-hunters leading the vanguard.'

  Jetbikes, incredibly swift and deadly to a small party like ours.

  I had seen them operating in packs out on the plains, using their superior speed to encircle and then execute isolated groups of survivors. At Ruuman's mention of them, a bleak memory resurfaced of one of my brothers being dragged to his death, chains hooked to his flesh on the back of a jetbike while its rider laughed at the grim spectacle.

  Some rode solo too, and these scouts could be just as deadly. If spotted by one it would be almost impossible to silence the outrider without drawing unwelcome attention. If that happened then the vultures would flock to the feast with us as their carrion meat.