Legion (6 page)

Soneka stood out in the chilly darkness, under the enveloping cloak of the sky, and watched until all traces of the speeder had vanished into the endless black.

T
HEY RAN THE
Scarab into the west, along the old trail, using only auspex and the low-light viewers wired to the dashboard. The viewers showed the world like a green moonscape, but they had only a one hundred and ten degree forward spread, so when Bronzi or Shiban turned their heads too far left or right, the ghostly view vanished in a wash of fizzle and telemetry junk.

The Scarab coasted well, and made eighty kilometres per hour over the clearest terrain. Bronzi loved grav-effect transports, and always tried to secure them for his Jokers when dismount assaults were on the cards. He let Shiban drive for the first three hours, through the tipping point of midnight. The stars came out over the desert rim with a rare magnificence, heightened by their viewers.

‘You ever going to tell me what this is about?’ Shiban asked.

‘No,’ said Bronzi.

T
HREE HOURS BEFORE
sunrise, Bronzi took the stick. The world ahead of him was a jumbled, fast-moving path of lime-cast furrows, with the occasional emerald crag looming for a moment before it was lost behind them. Shiban sat back, reclining in the shotgun seat, and took a pinch from his box. Then he played with the auto-turret controls, impelling the sense-net to target the stern guns at passing rocks and crumbling slopes of sand rock.

‘Set it on auto-serve and get some kip, Dimi,’ Bronzi suggested.

Shiban yawned, and promptly fell asleep, rocking in his leather cradle.

Bronzi envied him. It had been years since he’d been able to manage the old geno trick of crash-sleep, the hypno-suggestive shut-down that allowed a man to catch a wink under any circumstances. Bronzi had been trained that way, but the knack had left him.

He kept his hand closed around the bucking stick and watched the ghost-green world outside flash by.

T
HE SUN CAME
up, a slow, terrible firestorm rising from the south. All of the landscape’s shadows stretched out, long and painful, and Bronzi took off the viewer. White light filtered in through the cabin’s chipped and crazed windows, and he decided to rely on auspex alone. Twenty kilometres now. The cursor on the cab’s lightmap display moved slowly towards its destination.

S
ONEKA WOKE WITH
a start. Nothing special there. The dull, afterglow of pain in his hand had woken him that way every morning since he’d arrived at Visages.

He sat up on his bunk. Dawn light, already hot and bright, speared in through the gaps around his rattan blind. He’d been having the strangest dream. He’d been playing the head game with Dimi, and Lon had brought him a good piece. He’d taken the diorite head out of Lon’s calloused hands, and looked down at it to judge it.

The carved face had been Hurtado’s. It had grinned up at him.

‘Tell me this, Peto,’ the head had said, ‘all these broken heads, are any two faces alike, or are they all different?’

‘I don’t know, Hurt. Get out of my dream.’

‘It’s important. Do they all look the same? Are they all different? Doesn’t that matter? Doesn’t it?’

Soneka had lobbed the head away into the wide scree field of broken heads. He’d done it with his left hand. His left hand had had fingers and a thumb.

‘Fug,’ Soneka said, coughing. He had dust in his throat. That was par for the course at Visages.

He looked down at his incomplete hand and felt the missing fingers waggle.

He had slept naked. He pulled on his breeches, socks and boots, and went out into the early light bare-chested. A hard rind of sun was cresting the edge of the crags. The sky was off-white, like old ivory, and the landscape was a pink wash, broken by hard black shadows bending to evade the sun. It was going to be a hot one. He could already feel the air baking. The local livestock, some of them still saddled from the previous day’s racing, wandered free, grazing the patchy grasses. Soneka walked towards the well, rubbing his face with his good hand. He needed a shave; a shave and a grapefruit.

The livestock all looked up at the same time. They stared in the same direction, some of them still chewing, and then broke and scattered.

Geno instinct pulled Soneka back into the cold shadows of one of the terracotta huts. He looked around, suddenly very alert. Where were the sentries, the perimeter guard, the overnight patrols?

The pink wash of the landscape moved. Semi-visible figures scurried forwards out of the desert rim.

Soneka swallowed hard. He turned and ran back through the shaded maze of dwellings towards the post commander’s habitent. He wanted to raise the alarm, but he didn’t want the enemy to know he’d raised the alarm. Koslov had a silent signal device that trembled every post resident’s wrist cuff.

Soneka slipped into the hot darkness of the habitent. Koslov sat at his camp desk, staring at Soneka in surprise.

‘Commander!’ Soneka whispered. ‘Emergency alert now!’

Koslov didn’t move. He continued to stare back at Soneka with the same look of mild surprise. ‘Commander Koslov?’

Koslov’s eyes did not follow Soneka as he moved forwards. They continued to stare at the tent flap where Soneka had entered. Koslov didn’t move at all.

Soneka threw himself sideways.

The falx swung by the echvehnurth concealed behind the inner tent flap missed the hetman by a matter of centimetres. The blade
chokked
through the groundsheet into the dirt beneath. Soneka rolled and came up on his feet. The Nurthene yanked his long blade free and charged him.

‘Alarm! Alarm!’ Soneka began to shout. ‘Enemy in the camp!’

He dived headlong over the desk to avoid the lunging blade, and fell into Koslov. Koslov toppled backwards off his seat, his camp table collapsing under Soneka’s weight. Blood ebbed slackly out of Koslov’s nose and mouth. He continued to stare, in mild surprise, at the roof of the tent.

Soneka rolled off the still-warm corpse, and fumbled frantically to release Koslov’s service pistol from its holster.

The Nurthene whirled his falx so high it ripped a slit in the tent roof. He swung it down. Soneka threw himself to one side. The descending blade cut clean through Koslov’s left shoulder.

‘Alarm!’ Soneka yelled again, diving away. Outside, he heard shouting, and the sudden, sporadic bark of las weapons.

Soneka threw a saddle bag at the advancing Nurthene, and the whispering falx struck it aside. He scrambled backwards, hurling a writing case. The falx splintered it, and a shower of pens, nibs and blotting patches spilled out. Soneka ducked again, and the falx tore a wide gash in the tent wall.

Geno training took over. As he landed, Soneka groped for a weapon, any weapon, and found a writing quill that had fallen out of the writing case. Soneka seized it, tested its weight automatically, and threw it like a dart, underhand.

It embedded itself, nib first, in the echvehnurth’s left cheek. The Nurthene yelped and lurched backwards. Soneka leapt up and grabbed the haft of the falx. He kneed the Nurthene in the groin. Now the bastard really staggered. He howled. His grip on the falx weakened.

Soneka tore the weapon out of the echvehnurth’s hands and swung it. The echvehnurth’s head rolled clean off his shoulders in a puff of blood. The body folded up, and the head bounced off the ground sheet beside it.

Gripping the falx, Soneka strode across the habitent to the master alarm control. He smacked it, and sirens began to wail all across the Visages post.

He walked back to Koslov’s body, staked the falx blade down in the ground, and pulled out the service pistol, a heavy las model.

Two Nurthene raiders burst in through the habitent mouth and Soneka shot them both in the face. They walloped over on their backs, their silver plates dotted with droplets of blood.

Pandemonium had erupted outside the command tent. The waking Imperial troops, roused by his shots and the blaring sirens, were scrambling to fight off the Nurthene intruders. The dawn air whizzed with gunfire and the
sumkk
of impacting blades. Soneka heard awful wails of pain.

With the pistol in his good hand, he went outside into the baking air. A Nurthene ran at him, falx raised. Soneka blew the man’s throat out with a single shot and dropped him on the sand. All around him, las carbines rattled on auto. The shouts and yells were deafening. He ran towards the cold store.

Bodies littered the ground outside the mud brick building: Imperial soldiers, mostly half-dressed, sliced into pieces. He went inside, and shot down the two Nurthene he found there. One fell forwards against the stacked, frozen bodies in their shrouds, and wrenched off his breastplate as he slid down. The breastplate landed in front of Soneka, rattling to a stop. He saw the engraved reed emblems and the snapping crocodilia.

‘Get. Out,’ a voice gasped. ‘Run.’

He turned. Medicae Ida stood behind him. She clutched at the falx that stapled her through the chest to the cold store wall. Her gown was soaked in blood. Her own, for the first time.

‘Medicae!’ Soneka yelled.

‘Too late for me,’ she wheezed, and died.

A Nurthene raider burst in behind them, and Soneka spun around, firing a shot that silenced the man forever.

More followed, falxes raised. Soneka began to shoot. By his weapon’s digital display, he had twenty shots left. Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen…

B
RONZI BROUGHT THE
Scarab to rest and hit the dampers. The sun was up, fierce and bold.

‘Wake up,’ he told Shiban as he unstrapped his harness. Shiban groaned.

Bronzi jumped down out of the speeder and looked around. His stomach was grumbling. Where the hell was Honen’s promised cavalry? The cratered desert spread out all around him in the burning light of the rising sun.

He saw a figure toiling up the trail towards him, a tall figure wobbled by the heat haze. Bronzi waited, two minutes, three. The figure came closer, becoming properly visible.

It was a Space Marine in full battle plate. The armour was purple, trimmed in silver, with green markings on the immense shoulder plates.

‘Great god,’ Bronzi murmured.

The towering Astartes came to a halt ten paces from Bronzi and the speeder. Soft red light glowed like embers in its eye slits as it read and targeted him.

‘Bronzi, we meet again,’ the helmet speaker crackled.

‘Sir?’

The Astartes held its massive boltgun close against its armoured chest.

‘I warned you. You really do know how to stir up trouble, don’t you, Hurtado?’

Bronzi blinked. ‘I don’t understand. This is important! This is—’

‘None of your business, but you’ve made it your business, which is a colossal mistake, and a shame, because you’re a decent fellow. There’s only one option.’

‘What the fug are you talking about?’ Bronzi cried, wishing, very suddenly, he’d brought a weapon with him.

‘Back right off, you son of a bitch,’ Shiban declared, moving out from behind the cover of the hovering tank, his double-carbine raised to his shoulder and aimed squarely at the armoured figure.

‘Dimi, don’t!’ Bronzi yelled.

‘No one threatens my friends,’ Shiban growled back. He edged forwards, his weapon fixed steadily on the figure in purple armour.

The Astartes turned its visor slowly to regard Shiban. The soft red ember-light flickered in its eye slits.

Far too fast for Bronzi to follow, the Astartes wheeled and fired its bolter. Dimitar Shiban, who remembered his dreams word for word, left the ground and exploded as he travelled backwards, showering blood and meat in all directions. His twisted carcass hit the ground and lay still.

‘Oh god! Oh Terra! No!’ Bronzi yelled.

The Astartes switched its aim back to Bronzi. Bronzi sank to his knees in the dust.

‘Please…’ he murmured.

‘As I said,’ the Space Marine remarked, stepping forwards, its bolter aimed, ‘there is only one option.’

‘Why are you doing this?’ Bronzi pleaded.

‘For the Emperor,’ the Astartes replied.

THREE

Mon Lo Harbour, Nurth, two days later

T
HOUGH
J
OHN
G
RAMMATICUS
was over a thousand years old, he had only been Konig Heniker for eight months, and he was still getting used to the idea.

According to his file, and as far as any Imperial methods of scrutiny were concerned, Konig Heniker was a fifty-two year-old man from a region of Terra known as the Caucasus, and he served in the Imperial Army as an intelligence officer attached to the Geno Five-Two Chiliad.

Grammaticus still thought of himself as
essentially human
. He had been born human, raised as a human, and he had been human when, to all intents and purposes, he had died for the first time. Definitions became a little more complicated after that. One thing was certain: at some non-specific point after his first death, probably as the result of a slow process rather than a sudden change of heart, he had stopped being quite so steadfast in his devotion to the interests of his birth species.

He was still unashamedly fond of the human race, and was a stout apologist for its less edifying qualities, but he had been with the Cabal for a long time, and they had shared the Acuity with him, at least in part. These days, he saw what his birth race had once been wont to call ‘the long view’.

Grammaticus was one of the last few humans still working as an agent of the Cabal. Over the centuries, the Cabal had recruited a good many human go-betweens, but most of them were long dead, forgotten or disavowed.

The Cabal had been recruiting human agents for as long as there had been humans to recruit, a fact Grammaticus always found particularly hard to reconcile. At the very start of human history, before writing, before Ur and Catal Huyuk, before Mohenjodaro and Thebes, before the construction of the lost monuments, the Cabal had visited Terra and encountered a breed of unprepossessing, unpromising mammalian hominids busy making its first axe marks on the trunks of ancient woodland trees to mark out its first boundaries.