Scorched Earth Read online

  'Death,' I uttered, trying to lift the battle-helm but finding it snagged by the cables coupling it to my armour. 'Get it off,' I snapped. 'Get it off!'

  'Hold on,' said Ruuman, and I was vaguely aware of him disconnecting the makeshift interface. When he was done, I wrenched the helmet free and set it down as if scalded by its touch and wary of its presence.

  I did not need to tell Ruuman what I had seen. He could tell by the look on my face.

  'It is over then?' he asked.

  'Vulkan lives…' I gasped, desperately, defiantly, deluded. 'He must.'

  Usabius was still at the edge of the rocks, keeping watch on the encampment, and offered no support.

  The droning sky-hunter made its fourth pass.

  'It's getting closer,' said Ruuman. 'The rider suspects he has found something in the rocks but has yet to actually locate it.'

  'A vanguard has arrived to lead the column out,' uttered Usabius. I followed his pointing finger, still reeling from what I had just witnessed, and saw two sky-hunters accelerate into the rapidly diminishing encampment and take up point positions at the head of the Iron Warriors. The riders were halfarmoured and went without helms or vambraces. They wore visors instead, gauntlets torquing the horned handlebars of their mounts. Fumes and smoke belched from thick exhaust ports. Low-riding, leaning back, they laughed and bellowed at one another. Perhaps the sons of Perturabo had some madmen in their ranks after all.

  At last they were leaving. I fought hard to make that fact matter, to not have the victory of it obliterated by the stark evidence of what I had seen through Vulkan's eyes.

  Ruuman was watching the Iron Warriors too.

  'Two sky-hunters means a third is missing. Our creeping shadow, I would reckon.'

  'He lives,' I told the Ironwrought, my gaze panning across the struck camp to the cave mouth. 'Vulkan lives.'

  'You said yourself, Salamander, that he does not.'

  'The helm was not where he fell,' I said, seizing on an unlikely truth. 'It means he could have survived, picked it up.'

  'There was nothing left of that feed,' asserted Ruuman. 'He's dead, Ra'stan. Accept it, so that we might leave here and live a little longer.'

  'No.'

  A true dawn was rising, the sun of Isstvan breaching the hills and banishing the shadows. It could not disperse the radiation storm bearing down on us from the north, but that hardly mattered now.

  I rose to my feet, joining Usabius at the edge of the rocks.

  Below us, the armoured column was rolling out.

  'We have to go now, for certain this time,' I said, and Usabius nodded.

  'That way lies death,' said Ruuman, also rising but heading in the opposite direction.

  'Then we choose death!' I snarled. 'For what else is there on this cursed world for any of us?'

  'I cannot follow you that way, son of Vulkan,' the Ironwrought replied. He urged me to go with him. 'Don't sacrifice yourself on such a foolish errand. Live and make them work for the scalp. I will. While we live there is hope. Please, come with me, Ra'stan.'

  I shook my head, slowly, lowering my gaze. My path was set before me, there would be no deviation from it. When I looked up again Ruuman was gone, having disappeared over the rocks on the other side.

  'Don't worry, brother,' Usabius told me, affecting an air of mild fatalism, 'it is Salamander business we go to now. Better that it's just us.'

  'Aye… Just us.'

  To the east, the sun was rising above the lip of the horizon, painting the volcanic plains in red.

  I looked to the gauntlet laid out before us and our ignorant huntsmen that were still too close for us to avoid completely. Even making it across the camp was far from certain, let alone surviving what we might encounter in the cave itself.

  'We skirt the edges of the camp,' I said, gesturing to a ragged chain of fang-like rocks. I met Usabius's gaze. It was burning, full of conviction. 'Stay low and move fast,' I told him.

  'Vulkan lives,' he said to me.

  'Vulkan lives,' I replied, then we leapt over the barrier of rock together and ran like the hell-drakes of Nocturne were behind us.

  We had barely reached halfway when a shout rang out, more deafening than a gunshot.

  Ruuman had been right. The Iron Warriors had seen us.

  I risked a glance and saw the armoured column was still moving but the two sky-hunters had peeled off and were roaring towards us. Slab-nosed and bulky, the jetbikes bullied their way through the lifting gloom before the dawn. Angular fairings at the prow gave them a hard and unyielding appearance. Close up, their riders were wild, whirling spiked chains around their heads and hooting in anticipation of the kill. The rest of the Iron Warriors seemed satisfied to let them have our blood and drove away from the advancing storm.

  Judging by their hellish speed, I reckoned we could get another thirty metres before they were upon us. The underslung cannons glaring from beneath each sky-hunter's nose could shred us before we got another three, but the riders appeared to be intent on close-quarters.

  Also, both had directed their mounts at me.

  'Get to the cave. Go!' I bellowed.

  Usabius ran on ahead, as I slowed and drew my chainsword.

  Two warriors mounted on jetbikes against one on foot. The odds were not in my favour.

  I had left my battle-helm up on the rocky shelf next to Vulkan's. In my haste and lingering trauma, I had forgotten both. The acrid tang of their exhaust fumes reached me before they did. Black sand whipped up in their wake and stung my eyes. I tasted the petro-chemical stink of their engines, felt them vibrate through the earth despite the fact they rode just above it on anti-gravitic repulsion plates.

  'Vulkan lives!' I roared, touching the chainsword to my forehead in a final warrior's salute. When I brought it back and settled into a fighting stance, its teeth were already blurring.

  As the Sky-hunters came to within twenty metres, they began to part.

  Encircled, I would be forced to choose one combatant or the other. It was no choice, really, not one that mattered at least. Pick one and my back would be exposed to the other. I could almost feel their heavy blades piercing my armour and flesh…

  'Vulkan lives…'I whispered one last time, sparing Usabius and the cave mouth a sideways glance. I could not see him, and hoped that meant he had made it.

  A keening blast of noise erupted from my right side, a staccato four-round burst that spat out a lethal welter of dark-red beams. An actinic charge filled the air at the same time, shimmered on it. A second later and the riders were screaming as the death ray chewed up their bikes and turned their flesh to dust, abruptly cutting them off.

  Two sky-hunters crashed into the earth, wrecked and ablaze. Chunks of Iron Warriors battle-plate joined them - an empty cuirass, greaves, boots and gauntlets, nothing inside them but ash.

  I knew the devastating effects of volkite weaponry. The Martians had made it particularly potent against biological matter. Ruuman rode the third jetbike, a flaring culverin sitting under his prow. As the beam weapon powered down, he engaged the mount's reserve arsenal. Paired bolters sunk into its fairings chugged to life, twin muzzle flares cutting star flashes in the half-light.

  I do not know if he had been planning this. Perhaps it was a contingency that he switched to when he realised that he had become one. The conversion beamer was absent, too hefty and impractical to carry on a jetbike, likely spent on executing the vehicle's previous rider.

  'Emperor praise you, you courageous fool,' I muttered as he sped past me, engines screaming and pouring his fire into the ablative armour of a Rhino. Strafing the vehicle's flank, he caught the fuel tanks and the Rhino went up in a ball of promethium fire.

  Head down, the Ironwrought rode on, chased by the pintle-mounts of the battle tanks. Shellfire stitched his wake, throwing up clods of volcanic sand, but I was running now and could not wait to see if my saviour escaped or not.

  Iron Warriors were coming after him, I heard their distant cries and
promises of revenge. They were coming after me too. With the sky-hunters destroyed, I was in the wind and it was a matter of honour that this not be allowed to stand. But tanks are not nearly as swift or agile as jetbikes. I was close enough to the cave that I could get inside before they caught me.

  After that… I had not thought any farther ahead.

  The same sickening sensation I had felt when I had seen the threshold of the cave through Lorimarr's mind's eye returned, only this time it was much more acute due to its actuality and proximity. The eight-pointed star drew my eye, compelling me, sickening me, but I fought its lure and breached the cave mouth gasping for breath.

  Once inside, the effects lessened and I wondered if the mark was some kind of ward, a piece of Mechanicum technology made to appear as if it were arcane and esoteric. I had broken through, charged down its web of influence, and had begun to recover.

  I looked around.

  Darkness seemed thicker in the cave, unnaturally so. Though the air was cool against my face, it prickled my skin and resisted my passage through it as if it were sticking mud and not air at all.

  It was deep, far deeper than it appeared from the outside, and spilled away into a narrow corridor of rock. As I could not see Usabius - I assumed he had penetrated farther. I followed the only route, hoping I would meet my brother at the end of it. I wanted to call out to him, to let him know I was coming and not likely to be alone, but I stopped short realising that I did not know what else lurked within. Furthermore, the acoustics would broadcast my exact position to anyone following behind.

  Time was the only advantage I possessed; I had no desire to relinquish it.

  After what felt like several kilometres, the tight confines of the cave expanded into a much wider and higher cavern. Though it was hard to tell with any certainty, I thought I must have travelled down into the subterranean tunnels of Isstvan, because the ceiling of this new chamber was vaulted and fanged with stalactites.

  It was colder here. Ice rimed the cavern's edges, and a light hoarfrost sparkled underfoot. Icicles dripped down from above, frozen in long, gnarled fingers.

  I blinked. The drops of ice were held in place, hovering stilly in the air. At first I thought it must be an optical illusion but as I got closer I saw it was not. Time had ceased to beat in this place. It was held fast, as if caught in amber.

  I blinked again.

  Usabius was standing in the middle of the chamber, looking up at one of the chrono-frozen drops.

  'I see it but I don't believe it,' he said. I assumed he was speaking to me.

  'Nothing feels right about this place, brother,' I replied.

  He turned, staring at me through his cracked retinal lens.

  'Where is your power fist?' I asked, as I noticed the weapon was missing.

  'I see it but I don't believe it,' he repeated.

  As I came closer to him, I noticed other subtle details of his appearance had changed too. His armour was more battered; black and burned extensively in some places as if he had been caught in a terrible fire.

  I frowned, not understanding. 'Usabius, what happened to you?'

  'See it but don't believe it,' he said, lifting up his hands to grip either side of his battle-helm.

  'Where is Vulkan?' I asked, a profound nausea creeping up from my gut. I swallowed back the bile in my throat. 'Brother, I…'

  Usabius… flickered. Like a mirage, he was there and then he was not. I had seen pict-casts do something similar. It was called ''ghosting''.

  'I…' My legs gave way and I put out my hands to stop from falling.

  Braced, but far from steady, my hearts thudded in my chest. It was so hard I expected to see them burst through my ribcage, rip open my plastron and flop onto the ground in front of me. The reality of my world as I thought I knew it was unravelling. Usabius was not as I remembered him, and through the flickering resolution of his seemingly temporal existence I perceived a half-truth beneath the image I had attempted to obscure him with.

  During the last years of the Great Crusade, when the remembrancers still attended our fleets, when there was still something worth remembering, I heard an imagist speak of pentimento. The word derived from the ancient Romanii of old Terra, and meant ''repent''. It referred to the act, by an artisan, of painting over an error. With patience, skill and the correct materials, such earlier drafts could be revealed beneath the layer that hid them. With savage clarity, I realised that I had painted over Usabius. This was my repentance for some misdeed. By now, my mind was reeling and despite my superior cognitive faculties, processing everything I was seeing was not easy. I knew, however, that in some as of yet undefined way, I had failed my brother.

  Stark and harrowing as all of this was, a greater revelation yet awaited.

  As I sagged with the weight of my guilt, my eyes strayed to the ground where I saw a mark burned into the earth. Fixated on the ceiling and its strange, time-defying properties, I had not noticed it until I was on top of it. A ring of black was burned indelibly into the ground, spikes interrupting its perfect circumference as if from some pulsing kinetic reaction.

  I had seen such effects before, they usually came after teleportation, and were the residue from the extreme energy exchange that took place during spatial translation.

  At first, I did not know what it meant, but then I saw the second mark sat within the first, encircled by the ring. It was difficult to discern. Wide shoulders, a broad back, kneeling down with its head bowed.

  A figure, clearly. An individual primed for teleportation.

  'What does it mean?' I asked, looking up from a half-prone position. Anger was rising in my gorge, getting the better of my other humours. Something else too, an emotion entirely foreign but familiar at the same time. Panic. Anxiety.

  They shall know no fear…

  It was our mantra, it was the way the Emperor had made us, distilled from the vital essence of his sons, our fathers. Genetic engineering, legacy, primacy: it was all undone in that moment.

  Usabius stared, his hands still locked to his battle-helm as if, like the ice droplets, he too was frozen in time.

  'Answer me!'

  The burning light of my brother's eye flared again and with a hiss of escaping pressure, he slowly removed his battle-helm. Beneath was a face I barely recognised. It was burned, ravaged by hell's fire. Salamanders are resilient to heat, but we are not impervious.

  Though I tried to prevent it, though I had shored up my mental bulwarks with falsehood to protect me, the dam was now broken and veracity rushed over me in a flood.

  Usabius had lost his identity to a firestorm, one that had billowed from the guts of a dying drop-ship and spilled out into his own. I had tried to warn him, to save his life, but I was too late. I let him go, and by the time I looked back only his clawed finger marks remained, dug into the metal.

  'You died,' I uttered, almost in a rasp.

  Reality seized me fully then, took hold like a docking clamp against the hull of a starship.

  I remembered the pit of the dead, the Raven Guard as he stirred from unconsciousness about to give away my position. I was alone, having dragged him halfway across Isstvan, when the search lamps began to strafe. I could not risk his waking dooming us both, so I leaned over and crushed him with my power fist.

  In the cave, I looked down at my right arm and saw the glove encasing it.

  Aboard the Purgatory, an argument between myself and Sulnar had ended in a strained accord. I had believed my words to him of the carnage out on the plains, of the suffering and the pain expressed through the lips of another, through Usabius, but it was me. I said those words. The lieutenant commander had not moved when Usabius barged past him, because no one had barged past him. No one else had been there.

  In the wreckage of the drop-ship, searching desperately for Vulkan. Even the traitor, Lorimarr, could perceive the truth and it amused him greatly to witness the mania to which I had succumbed. How could I have survived his psychic attack? Only another psyke
r could have done that.

  Even my rank was a lie. The dying legionary Ik'rad had called me lord. He had once known me as an Epistolary. Only Usabius had ever called me captain. It was his rank, not mine. After his death, after the crash and the torment in my shackled psyker's mind, I had become him or part of him and the projection I had fashioned was part of me, the part I could not fully reconcile.

  I am Usabius, the half-remembered memory of a corpse conflated with my own self-identity.

  We live in hell, a hell of black sand where nothing is as it should be and all has come to madness. A warrior, even one as steeled as a Space Marine, could lose his mind in such turpitude.

  My thoughts returned, strangely apt in the circumstances.

  'You died, brother,' I said, addressing the manifestation of my mind that wore the corpse-form of Usabius.

  It nodded.

  'I am sorry for that.'

  It made no response, and only kept staring.

  'Is any of this real? The cave, the Iron Warriors, the survivors?'

  Like some spectre of ancient Terran myth, Usabius extended a jagged-looking finger to point at the scorched earth surrounding me.

  Here was truth. Much like a drowning man whose senses are dulled by the water, I surfaced from a dark dream into an even darker reality.

  As I contemplated the meaning of the mark, I heard the rush of booted feet coming up the corridor from behind me. The Iron Warriors were almost here, as real as the sweat on my brow or the earth beneath me.

  'It won't be long—' I said, but stopped short.

  Usabius was gone, and I was alone just like I always had been.

  Haukspeer had given his life following a madman out into the night; Ruuman too, probably. They must have known. On some small level, I think I did too but kept it hidden away in a locked part of my mind where I could keep it shut down.

  I pushed myself up, gripping my chainsword in my off-hand as I rose. I would meet these bastards on my feet.

  Broken or not, I was still a warrior of the Legiones Astartes, I was still a Salamander.

  One revelation remained, still denied to me by the mystery of the cave.