Rescue was a word he certainly did not like.
The Stormbird began to shake more furiously as they entered the outer radiation bands of the high atmosphere. Plumes of what looked like flame flashed past the small, semi-shuttered cabin ports. The tongues were blue, mauve and green, like noxious gases burning in a lab. For a moment, Daylight wondered if they were some trace of the warp, some daemonic lightning. All along there had been quiet rumours that the silent hand of Chaos, whose actions had been absent from the galactic theatre for a troublingly long time, might be playing a part in the Ardamantuan misadventure.
But it was not false fire or warp-scald. It was a geomagnetic display, auroras of charged particles ripping through the maddened thermosphere.
‘Any indication of vessels in nearspace?’ asked Daylight.
‘Negative,’ replied the tech-adept.
Another hope dashed. There was a fleet here, somewhere, the best part of the entire Imperial Fists battlefleet, unless it had been utterly reduced and annihilated already. Where was it? It could be directly in front of them, but veiled from them by the tumult.
The descent turbulence became progressively worse. The Stormbird was shaking like a sistrum at a fervent ritual. Lines of red alert lights were flashing into life along the pilot’s enclosing consoles, filling entire rows. Deftly, with great calm, the pilot took one black-leather-gloved hand off the helm and muted the alarms.
Daylight began to flick through the meagre and imperfect surface scan readings they were finally obtaining, as they got closer and their auspex systems penetrated the atmosphere a little more deeply. They were on a pre-selected dive towards the location of the blisternest, working on the tactical assumption that the site was the last place their forces had been reported. But there was no clear sign of the structure, and little of the surrounding landmass matched, in relief or topographical schemata form at least, the geography logged by the survey teams that had accompanied the original assault.
‘Is this just bad luck?’ asked Zarathustra.
Daylight turned and looked at the wall-brother strapped in beside him. Zarathustra’s war-spear was mounted like a harpoon on the weapon rack above his grim-helmed head. He was the oldest of all the wall-brothers and had been the most reluctant to abandon the old tradition and leave the walls of the Palace behind.
‘Bad luck?’ replied Daylight. He noted that Zarathustra had selected the discretion of a helm-to-helm link. There were other wall-brothers in the craft alongside them, not to mention forty atmospherically-armoured shock troops of the Astra Militarum Asmodai Seventieth, Heth’s finest. The Guardsmen and their leader, Major Nyman, seemed to Daylight to be about the finest and most resolute warriors that unmodified human flesh could compose, but he did not want them overhearing dissent from an Adeptus Astartes warrior as they fell headlong into Hades. Through the dark and slightly breath-fogged visor lenses of their faceplates, he could see pale, drawn, anxious faces that winced at every violent buck and lurch the Stormbird threw.
‘Bad luck happens even to good men, Daylight,’ said Zarathustra, his voice chopped and frayed by the interference patterns even on the short-range dedicated link. ‘Sometimes the forces of light prevail, sometimes the forces of darkness take the upper hand. Sometimes, as history teaches us, fate itself intervenes.’
He turned his impassive visor to look directly at Daylight. There was a gouge of raw metal across the otherwise perfectly polished faceplate, a gouge that had been left by the blade of one of the Sons of Horus during the fight at Zarathustra Wall. Heresy wounds were never patched, though the brother who had taken that stroke no longer dwelt inside the armour.
‘Think of Coldblood and his wall, at Orphan Mons,’ said Zarathustra. ‘They took that day against the eldar raiders, full of glory. Then the star went nova and took Coldblood, his wall and the surviving eldar. Victor and defeated alike, levelled by the whim of the conscienceless cosmos.’
‘They say the eldar corsairs engineered that stellar bomb to effect a pyrrhic victory,’ said Daylight.
‘They say… they say… Don’t spoil my story,’ grumbled Zarathustra. ‘My point is sound. Sometimes you kill the enemy, sometimes the enemy kills you, and sometimes the universe kills you both. This may have been a very conventional fight against these xenoforms, these Chrome things. Mirhen was probably wiping the floor with them, soaking the dust with their blood, or whatever they have that passes for blood…’
Zarathustra’s eye-slits were milky pale, and back-lit by a faint green glow, but Daylight could feel the intensity of his old friend’s gaze upon him.
‘Then the planet dies. Solar storm. Gravity anomaly. Tachyon event. Whatever. Doesn’t matter who’s winning then. We end up with a mess like this.’
Daylight glanced at his overhead again. The only time he had ever seen data footage of a planet as catastrophically mangled and tortured as Ardamantua was in feeds of unstable worlds to be avoided as ‘not supportive’. Six weeks earlier, the cream of his Chapter, the majority of his kin, the shield-corps itself, had been down there, dug in and on a solid footing, burning out the last vestiges of a numerous but outclassed enemy.
‘Are you suggesting we turn back and give them up as lost?’ he asked.
‘Of course not.’
‘Then what?’
‘I’m suggesting that we prepare ourselves for the worst,’ said Zarathustra. ‘If this mudball has up and died under Master Mirhen and our brothers, then…’
‘We will make a great mourning like never before, greater even than we did for our Primarch-Progenitor,’ said Daylight, simply.
‘It would be the worst loss imaginable,’ agreed Zarathustra. ‘For the Imperial Fists, the Old Seventh, greatest of all the Adeptus Astartes, and the most loyal of all defenders of Terra, to be reduced to… to nothing, to nothing but the last fifty wall-brothers stationed at the Palace. To lose all but five per cent, to be diminished to a twentieth… How would we ever recover from that?’
Daylight had no answer. Zarathustra was right. It was unthinkable. Even a force of transhuman warriors dedicated to dying in the service of the Imperium did not like to consider what might happen if they all died. The gene-seed loss alone would be an atrocity. Could they ever rebuild, even turning to Successor Chapters for support and bloodline? No loyal First Founding Chapter had ever been entirely swept away, not in the history of the Imperium, not even in the Heresy War.
Would the Imperial Fists be the first to pass into legend?
Some said, quietly and very informally, that it was inevitable. The Adeptus Astartes were a dying breed. Bloodlines and gene-seeds were gradually failing over time. The vigour had waned, and long gone was the time, pre-Heresy, when thousands upon thousands of Space Marines marshalled under the stars. The bitter gall of the Heresy had cut them down, halved their Legions, decimated the surviving loyalists, and tragically reduced the Chapters’ ability to produce new Space Marines in anything like the numbers of old. With the possible exception of the Ultramarines – and even there, there was the contention that the same plight ultimately afflicted them too – the Adeptus Astartes were diminishing. They were a finite resource, used only for the most elite missions and efforts. They were slowly, very slowly, dying out. Senior men in the Chapter predicted that within four or five hundred years, unless effective new methods of gene-seed synthesis could be developed and a new Golden Age brought about, the Space Marine would be a thing of myth.
In his early life, before the honour of wall-brother had been granted him, before he had become Daylight, Daylight had fought the eldar. In fact, it was his deeds in the face of the eldar that had led to the wall-brother honour being bestowed upon him.
Daylight had admired the eldar immensely. They were truly worthy opponents, and he had always thought them sad, tragic, like figures in an ancient play. He had thought about them often as he paced the ritual patrol routes in the cold hallways of Daylight
Wall. They were great warriors, the greatest their species could produce, and in their time, in older ages, they had been peerless among the infinite stars.
Their time had passed, however, and their glory with it. Their suns were setting, and they were but ghosts of their old selves, unimpeachable warriors with great stories, proud histories, old glories and fine hearts, who were simply fighting their end-day wars as they waited for extinction to overwhelm them. When Daylight had slain the crest-helmed master of Sethoywan Craftworld, there had been tears in the alien’s eyes, and tears in Daylight’s too. When great eras end, all should mark them, even the champions of the next epoch. And no great heroes should ever pass unto shadow unmourned.
For a long time, Daylight had felt that the Space Marines were facing a similar long decline. They were more like the worthy eldar than they cared to admit: giants from another age who were simply living out their twilight amongst mortals, incapable of fending off the gathering darkness, and unable to recapture their halcyon greatness.
Daylight had not expected to see that end approach so fast inside his own lifespan. If the Imperial Fists were as lost as Zarathustra feared, perhaps the age of the Adeptus Astartes was coming to a close faster than anyone imagined.
Zarathustra’s words had troubled him in another way. He had spoken of the terrain turning against friend and foe alike, of Ardamantua and its geological mayhem being the true enemy.
That was a bleak prospect. The pride of the Imperial Fists was their ability to defend anywhere from anything. How could they hope to excel if anywhere and everywhere, the very ground itself turned on them?
The Stormbird bucked again, more violently than ever. More warning lights lit and a klaxon sounded. The pilot and his co-pilot were too busy controlling the breakneck descent to be able to cancel it this time. The lurching turned into a protracted bout of shuddering vibrations.
‘Atmospherics worse than cogitator prediction,’ said the tech-adept, a flutter in his tone. ‘Crosswinds… also, ash in the upper airbands.’
‘Ash?’
‘Volcanic ash, also particulate matter. Aerosolised mud. Organic residue.’
‘Hold on!’ the pilot yelled suddenly.
The Stormbird started to bank along its centre line. The exterior light beaming into the gloom of the cabin through the slit ports began to rapidly creep up the cabin walls, over the ceiling and back down the other side, illuminating the struggling, desperate faces of the Asmodai troopers behind their visor plates, cheeks and chins tugged by the inverting gravity.
The banking turned into a full rotation, then another, and then another, faster. Daylight knew that the humans aboard weren’t built to withstand that kind of flight trauma. The Stormbird crew members were modified enough to withstand it, with their reinforced bones and muscle sheaths, their inner ears and proprioception senses replaced by augmetics, and their stomachs and regurgitative mechanisms removed and regrafted with fluid ingesters. But the Imperial Guardsmen would be disorientated, panicked, distressed, vomiting inside their helmets, choking.
‘Stabilise!’ Daylight ordered.
‘Negative! Negative!’ the pilot yelled back. ‘We’ve hit some kind of gravitational–’
He didn’t finish the word. The turbulence became too great and too noisy for voice contact. The unpredictable gravitational anomalies that plagued Ardamantua were regarded as the greatest threat of all because they couldn’t be mapped and thus avoided.
And they couldn’t be explained.
Daylight heard the pilot yell something again.
On the ground, a broad plain of mud and boiling pools lay beneath the angry sky. Ragged grasses blew in the hot crosswinds. In the distance, the broken horizon coughed and smoked, and spat sparks into the sky.
The sky was low, a rotting mass of swirling cloud striped by lightning. The clouds were running swiftly across it, like a pict-feed playing fast. Far away, six bright raptors punched out of the clouds, diving, catching the sun. They stayed in formation for a second, but they were fluttering, beset by both savage crosswinds and a gravitational pocket that refused to obey the reality around it.
One burst into flames, like a flower blooming, scattering its shredded fuselage. A second failed to recover from its dive, and plunged like a stone into the distant hills. A third tried to bank, but then spun away like a leaf on the wind, out of sight.
The other three stayed true, pulled up, cut low, but their trajectories were not stable either.
Gravity stammered again, bubbling the sky and slamming them hard.
They fell into darkness and black cloud, and were lost.
Sixteen
Ardamantua
Anterior Six was dead. They carried him from the crash site and laid him next to the nine Asmodai fatalities. Daylight waited for Nyman to tell him the extent of the other injuries.
Zarathustra clambered back into the wreck to recover his spear. Daylight knew he was also going to mercifully finish off the valiant pilot and co-pilot who had brought them down as intact as they were, and now lay mashed and bleeding out in the Stormbird’s compressed nosecone. They were plugged into the drop-craft’s systems anyway, nerves and neural links. They had burned their minds out sharing the Stormbird’s impact agonies. Even without their limbs and torsos irrecoverably sandwiched in ruptured metal, they could never have been disconnected to walk away.
It was a duty Daylight would have preferred to do, but he had command, and there were too many duties to deal with. He appreciated Zarathustra taking that sad burden from him.
He looked down at Anterior Six’s body. On impact, a fracturing spar had sheared the wall-brother’s head off.
‘I never thought I’d see him dead,’ said Tranquility, at Daylight’s side.
The plain they had come down on was a broad one surrounded by low, smoke-dark hills. It was grassy, and peppered with curiously pretty blue flowers. Some of the petals, torn up by the crash and scattered by the wind, had fallen across Anterior Six’s yellow armour, as if laid there by mourners.
‘No time for sentiment,’ said Daylight. ‘Give me a situation report, brother.’
Tranquility cleared his throat.
‘Flight crew dead, Daylight,’ he said. ‘Transport destroyed, vox-link down. No bearing from our instrumentation and portable auspex is flatlined. Last known location was forty kilometres short of the blisternest site.’
Daylight nodded.
‘No contact with the other birds,’ said Tranquility.
‘I saw one blow out.’
‘I think at least one other crashed before we hit,’ Tranquility agreed. ‘Gravity was just shot. We probably all fell out of the sky.’
‘So we’re all that we can count on,’ said Daylight.
‘There might be others nearby who survived the landing and–’ Tranquility began.
‘This is not a place where we can deal in “mights”,’ replied Daylight. ‘Even the laws of the universe are playing tricks. We can only count on what we know.’
‘I understand,’ replied Tranquility. ‘Then we have you, and we have me. We have Zarathustra and we have Bastion Ledge. We have decent resources of ammunition and our close-combat weapons. We have no ground transport. We have Major Nyman, a brain-damaged tech-adept, and twenty-six Imperial Guardsmen with kit.’
‘I thought there were nine fatalities amongst the Asmodai?’
‘There were, outright. But there are another five more of them are too torn up to walk away. Out here, they’ll all be dead in an hour, less perhaps. Even with express evacuation to a medicae frigate, they probably wouldn’t make it.’
‘We move out,’ said Daylight. ‘Find high vantage. Assess the landscape and consider our next action.’
Tranquility nodded.
Daylight strode back through the flowering grasses towards the Stormbird wreck. Zarathustra was just emerging, spear in ha
nd. He reminded Daylight of one of the ancient, pre-Unity demigods, born alive from the belly of a fallen eagle. He liked the old myths. Paintings and tapestries of them filled the galleries and halls of the Imperial Palace, their meanings, names and symbolism lost forever, except perhaps in the memories and dreams of the Emperor.
‘Bad?’ asked Zarathustra.
‘And getting worse,’ Daylight replied. ‘We’re heading for those hills. You and I will move ahead with Bastion. Tranquility can escort the Guardsmen.’
‘We should stay together.’
‘They’ll slow us down. They’ll never cover the ground like we can. Besides, they’re in shock.’
‘What of their wounded? They’ll make them even slower.’
‘I know. I’ll do it.’
They walked back to the gathered survivors. A few of the Asmodai were carrying munitions and equipment crates from the opened stowage cavities of the Stormbird. Others crouched beside their injured brethren. Daylight noted that a few had formed a perimeter, lasweapons ready. Not in such shock, then. They remembered their duty.
The sun came out suddenly, covering the ragged plain and its sea of straw-coloured grasses and nodding flowers in a hot golden light. The roiling black clouds had parted briefly. The Stormbird had torn a two-kilometre scar across the ground, a long gouge like the one that the Horusian blade had left on Zarathustra’s faceplate. The Stormbird’s impact had ripped up grasses and soil and bedrock, and scattered silvered shreds of its bodywork, wings and undercarriage. The fragments of metal caught the sudden sunlight like pieces of mirror or broken glass scattered in the swishing grasses, or like the cut jewels of a broad cloak spread out behind the noble craft.