The Damnation of Pythos Read online

  Galba nodded. To Khi’dem and Ptero he said, ‘Will you walk with me?’ To his relief, they did without saying anything further.

  Galba led the way from the bridge, through corridors of iron and granite, back towards the barracks, where there was so much space. Too much space.

  Ptero said, ‘Are you trying to store us away?’

  He shook his head. ‘I am trying to keep the peace.’

  ‘So I noticed,’ Khi’dem said. ‘You interrupted your captain. What was he about to say?’

  ‘I am not privy to his thoughts.’

  ‘I can guess,’ Ptero put in. ‘Those are not Legions. Those are ruins.’

  Galba winced at the truth. ‘As are we,’ he said. And they were. The Iron Hands numbered in the hundreds on the Veritas instead of the thousands. They were a shadow of their former strength.

  ‘Your honesty does you honour,’ said Ptero. ‘But we would still like our answers.’

  Galba bit back his own exasperation. ‘You will have them once there are answers to give.’

  ‘There is no campaign plan?’

  ‘We are here to learn it.’

  Ptero sighed. ‘Would it have done your captain an insurmountable injury to tell us that much?’

  Galba thought about what he had to say next. There was no easy way of doing it. No diplomatic way, either, though if he was honest with himself, he was not that interested in pursuing one. It was enough that he had moved the discussion away from the bridge. There was much less likelihood of irrevocable violence occurring away from the command throne. ‘Captain Atticus,’ he said, ‘is not inclined to share operational information.’

  ‘With anyone? Or simply with us?’

  There was no escaping this moment. ‘With you.’

  ‘Why?’ the Salamander asked.

  ‘Because of Isstvan Five.’ They wanted to know? Good. He would tell them. He would tell them of his own anger. He stopped walking and faced them.

  ‘What about it?’ Khi’dem asked. ‘We all suffered our tragedies there.’

  ‘Because you turned your backs on our primarch.’

  ‘Ferrus Manus led a charge into madness,’ Khi’dem answered. ‘We might as well say that he abandoned us.’

  ‘He had Horus in full retreat. He could have ended the war there and then.’

  Khi’dem was shaking his head slowly. ‘He ran into a trap. We were all caught in it. He just plunged further into its maw and made the rout that much worse.’

  ‘Together, the three Legions would have been strong enough,’ Galba insisted.

  ‘If Manus had stayed,’ Ptero said, his voice not angry but sad and surprisingly gentle, ‘do you think we could have taken back the dropsite from four armies fresh to the battlefield?’

  Galba wanted to answer in the affirmative. He wanted to insist that victory would have been possible.

  ‘Three Legions, but against eight,’ Khi’dem said before Galba could answer. ‘With the three caught between hammer and anvil. There was never another possible outcome. The only dishonour lies with the act of treachery.’

  Khi’dem’s logic was rigorous. But it was not enough. The anger that was souring Galba’s blood, the anger that he shared with every warrior of the Iron Hands, was as large as the tragedy engulfing the Imperium. It was too deep, too complex to be soothed by a simple recitation of reality. The facts that Khi’dem presented only made things worse. The rage ran up against maddening impotence, built up, and lashed out at ever more targets. Galba knew Khi’dem was right. The Raven Guard and the Salamanders had been badly bloodied by the first phases of the fighting. Their tactics had been sound in seeking the reinforcements at the dropsite. But Ferrus Manus had smashed hard into Horus’s forces. Torture came from the thought that with the additional force of two further Legions, perhaps the blow would have been massive enough to crack open the Warmaster’s plan. And beyond tactics, beyond strategy, there was the principle: the Iron Hands had called out to their brother Legions, and been denied. In the wake of defeat and the loss of their primarch, how could they not see that abandonment as another form of betrayal?

  There was only one thing that kept Galba from lashing out at the warriors before him. It was the recognition of the other facet of the anger: self-loathing. The Iron Hands had failed, and for this they could never forgive themselves. They had faced the most crucial test in the history of their Legion, and they had been found wanting. Excise the weakness? Galba wanted to consign his failed flesh to oblivion, replace it with the machinic infallible, and crush the skull of every traitor in his fists. He was conscious of this wish, though, and of its futility, and of its origin. He knew that he was seeing the world through the filter of his self-directed anger. So he did not trust his impulses. He forced himself to wait a beat before any response. He forced himself to think.

  But what of Atticus? What of the warrior who had no flesh left to condemn? He felt the anger in all its forms. Of that, Galba was certain. But was Atticus aware of its toxicity? Was he conscious of its shaping nature? The sergeant did not know.

  He knew this: as brutalised as the Iron Hands had been on Isstvan V, even fewer Salamanders and Raven Guard had survived. And he knew that if the hope of victory was to survive, it would not be through reaching for the throats of other loyalists. It was possible that the fatal mistakes had been made long before the engagement. His blood chilled when he thought of how the fleet of the X Legion had been divided, the faster ships leaving the Veritas Ferrum and others behind in the race to the Isstvan System. And maybe even that decision had not made the difference. Maybe there had been too many forces arrayed against the Emperor’s faithful. There was talk among the astropaths about agencies other than the traitors at work. So many possibilities, so many errors and coincidences and treacheries becoming the drip, drip, drip of bloody fate.

  All that was past. For the future, he knew one more thing: the loyalists, however few they were, must work together.

  If he could ensure even that small ember of hope, then he would fan it.

  He sighed, exchanging a look with Ptero and Khi’dem. He managed to summon a wry grimace. It was the closest he could come to a smile.

  ‘What are we doing?’ Ptero asked quietly. The veteran was not talking about strategy.

  Galba shook his head in sorrowful agreement. ‘I will keep you briefed,’ he said. ‘In return, will you do me this favour? Approach me rather than my captain.’

  Were positions reversed, he thought he might well consider the request a gigantic insult. But Khi’dem nodded in understanding. ‘I can see that would be for the best.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He started back to the bridge.

  Ptero caught his arm. ‘The Iron Hands are not alone,’ he said. ‘Don’t make the mistake of fighting as if you were.’

  Jerune Kanshell had just finished cleaning Galba’s arming chamber when he heard the heavy steps of the sergeant approaching. He grabbed his bucket and cloths, hurried out, and stood to one side of the entrance, eyes trained on the floor.

  Galba paused in the doorway. ‘A fine job as always, Jerune,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Thank you, lord,’ the serf answered. Galba’s acknowledgement was not unusual. It was what he said every time he returned and Kanshell happened to still be present. Even so, Kanshell felt a rush of pride, less for his work itself than for having been spoken to by his master. His duties here were simple. He was not to touch anything of real importance: armour, weapons, trophies, oaths of moment. It fell to him to clean the armour rack, to mop up the spills of oil from Galba’s own cleaning sessions. They were tasks a servitor could perform. But a servitor could not understand the honour that came with this duty. He did.

  Galba drummed a pensive rhythm against the doorway with his fingers. ‘Jerune,’ he said.

  Startled by this departure from the norm, Kanshell raised his head. Galba was loo
king down at him. The sergeant had a metal lower jaw. He was bald, and war had burned and slashed his face until it was a mass of scored, hardened tissue. It was the forbidding face of a being slowly moving further and further away from the human, yet it was not unkind.

  ‘My lord?’ Kanshell asked.

  ‘I know that the serf quarters took serious damage during the battle. How are the conditions?’

  ‘We are making good progress with the repairs, lord.’

  ‘That isn’t what I asked.’

  Kanshell swallowed hard as his throat closed in shame. He should know better than to dissemble before a warrior of the Legiones Astartes. He had spoken from an excess of pride. He wanted the god before him to know that even the humblest inhabitants of the Veritas were fighting the good fight. He wanted to say, We’re doing our part, but could not bring himself to utter words so presumptuous. But he did speak the truth. ‘The conditions are hard,’ he admitted. ‘But we fight on.’

  Galba nodded. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Thank you for telling me.’ His upper lip flattened out, and Kanshell realised that was how the sergeant now smiled. ‘And thank you for fighting on.’

  Kanshell bowed, his pride now as overwhelming as his shame had been a moment before. He must be glowing, he thought. Surely his skin was shining with the light of renewed purpose and determination granted to him by those simple words from Galba. And indeed, as he made his way back down the decks, it seemed to him that his path was more brightly lit than it had been earlier. He knew the impression was an illusion, but it was a helpful illusion. It gave him strength.

  He needed it when he reached the serf quarters.

  The humans who cleaned the ship, prepared the food and performed all the miscellaneous tasks too complex, too unpredictable or too varied for servitors, lived on one of the lowest decks of the Veritas Ferrum. There were thousands of them, and their home was something more than barracks, but less than a community. Before the nightmare of Isstvan V, this had been a space of regimental order. A vast, vaulted hall ran the length of the ship’s spine. From it, access to all the other decks was a direct, simple matter, though far from being quick, given the thousands of metres of foot-travel required. The hall was wide enough to support any degree of serf traffic. Over the course of the Great Crusade, because it was the one space where all could be present, it had gradually taken on the qualities of market, feasting hall and meeting place. However, those aspects always gave way before discipline and the efficient movement of personnel, and so there was always a steady, unimpeded flow of serfs cutting through every gathering, meal or trading bazaar. Running off the great hall, on either side, were the living quarters: primarily dormitoria, each sleeping one hundred, but there were also modest private quarters for the more valuable menials.

  The culture of Medusa was single-minded in its obsession with strength and condemnation of weakness. The Iron Hands had taken the animating spirit of their home planet to its furthest conclusion, despising the weakness of the flesh to the point that to be human at all seemed a regrettable flaw. Anything that did not contribute to the forging of perfect strength was a pointless distraction. Ferrus Manus had resented the imposition of remembrancers on his 52nd Expeditionary Fleet, and those irritating, unnecessary civilians had been left behind in the Callinedes System as the Iron Hands had rushed to confront Horus. Kanshell had been glad to see the back of them. As humble as his work was, it had a purpose in the great work that was the Iron Hands’ machine of war. But those other citizens of the Imperium who believed the Iron Hands to be without art, or a sense of aesthetics, were wrong. Art must have a clear, forceful purpose, that was all. Kanshell had heard whispers of the marvellous weapons Manus had possessed aboard the Fist of Iron. He believed the stories. The idea of the strongest, deadliest instruments also being the most beautifully wrought was utterly right. It was in line with everything that life on Medusa had taught him about the brutal ways of the universe. Strength of will could be given a physical shape, one that could be used to bring the savage universe to heel.

  The idea of Manus’s weapons was also in keeping with the art on the walls of the Veritas Ferrum. And, unlike her sister vessel, the Ferrum, there was art here. Kanshell had been surrounded by majesty for every moment of his existence on the strike cruiser. To move through the great access hall was to pass between relief sculptures of giants. The heroic figures were rendered in simple, bold lines. There was not a single superfluous detail, but there was nothing crude about the representations, either. They were direct. They were colossal. They were inspiring. They struggled and won against mythic beasts that symbolised the unforgiving volcanoes and ice of Medusa. They showed the way to strength. Weakness was foreign to them, and they were the spirit that even the lowest serf was duty-bound to embody.

  But this was all memory now. This was all as Kanshell’s world had been before Isstvan V. This was before the terrible shattering. The Veritas Ferrum had been badly damaged in the void war. The shields had gone down on the port flank, towards the stern. Fire had swept through that end of the serf quarters until an entire sector of the ship had been sealed and vented. There had been further torpedo strikes, catastrophic hits to port again just prior to the leap into the empyrean. The greatest wound had been to the upper decks, killing over a hundred legionaries. Even so, there had been further destruction at this level. More collapsing bulkheads, more fire, and then, when the tear in the ship’s flank had become deep enough, more of the terrible absence and cold that quenched fire, ended struggles, and purged the corridors of life.

  At least the Geller field had held. At least the voyage through the warp had not bled the ship even more.

  The hull had been repaired, but in the interior of the Veritas, entire decks were still strewn with wreckage. Some regions had become entirely inaccessible. Kanshell was glad that there were no wounded in those areas, no desperate survivors waiting for rescues that would never arrive. He had no reason to venture down the blocked paths, so he did not have to think about them. But there were plenty of scars in the serf quarters. Plenty of reminders of failure and defeat.

  The stern end of the great hall was still sealed. The serfs whose duties took them to that end of the ship had to travel a maze of byways to reach their posts. Elsewhere in the hall, fire had scorched the walls, defacing the art. Some of the dormitoria chambers had been destroyed, and the lines of the hall had been ruined by buckled and torn metal. The floor was rippled, uneven. Kanshell had to leap over half a dozen fissures as he made his way to the midships region of the hall.

  The space was still a thoroughfare, the servants of the Iron Hands still making their way at all hours from one end of the ship to the other, but its character had changed. The transformation was more than simply physical. The spirit of its inhabitants had been altered. The people of Medusa were no strangers to hardship and death. Those were the perpetual facts of existence on that planet. But the coming of Ferrus Manus had been the dawn of something new for the clans of Medusa: hope. It was not a weakling’s hope that a better, easier future lay just over the horizon. It was hope that took the form of belief in the strength to carve out that future. The Iron Hands were the realisation of that hope. Their victories were triumphs, not just in the Emperor’s name, but for Medusa itself.

  Now Manus was gone. The X Legion was gutted. The Veritas Ferrum journeyed on, but no one knew to where. Though it was not the serfs’ place to know their destination, Kanshell had heard some whispers that the legionaries did not know their goal either. The whispers were few, and the whisperers were terrified, not angry, and more than a little ashamed to be entertaining such thoughts. No amount of guilt changed the fact that the thoughts had been spoken and now had their own life. Kanshell would not believe the whispers. But having heard them, he could not escape the question.

  Kanshell slowed as he approached the centre of the hall. Straight ahead, there was a gathering of a few dozen people. They stood close together, f
orming a tight circle, their faces towards its centre, their heads bowed. The duty-bound serfs flowed by on either side of the group, like a stream around a stone. Every few moments, one passer-by or another stopped for a moment to join in the communion. Others glanced at the circle with undisguised contempt. Georg Paert, a wall of a man who worked in the enginarium, snorted as he walked past. He grinned at Kanshell when he drew near. ‘Don’t let them put you off your appetite,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ Kanshell muttered, but Paert had already moved on.

  The group was between Kanshell and the mess tables. He thought about hanging back until the meeting was finished, but he was famished, and he was due on a repair detail in a few minutes. He began to move across the width of the hall, cutting across the traffic to make a wide arc around the group. He had only taken a few steps when he heard his name called out. He grimaced and turned around. Agnes Tanaura had moved away from the cluster and was gesturing him over. Kanshell sighed. Might as well get this done. Better meet with her now, when he had a good reason to make this short, then to have her corner him later when he came off his shift.

  He joined her at the line-up to the mess service. Heated rations were distributed by a dispensary in the middle of the hall. It was surrounded by long, high iron tables. There were no benches. People ate quickly while standing, then moved on.

  ‘I saw you watching us, Jerune,’ Tanaura said.

  ‘You saw me seeing you. There’s a difference.’

  ‘Just like there’s a difference between looking at something from the outside, and being part of it.’

  Kanshell suppressed a groan. Tanaura was hardly being subtle. She was watching him intently, as she always did. Even the most casual conversation with Tanaura felt like an interrogation. Her eyes were a translucent grey, the same shade as her short hair. They shone with a predatory care. She was one of the older serfs on the Veritas Ferrum. Kanshell was not sure of her precise age. The life was a hard one, and used up the body quickly. Kanshell had friends he had grown up with, but they had drawn duties of such rigour that they looked more like his parents than his peers. Tanaura came by her leathered skin honestly. As far as Kanshell and anyone of his acquaintance knew, she had always been here. She had taken on the role of collective mother, whether her uncountable foster children welcomed her attentions or not.