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The Last Detail – Paul Kearney

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A Black Library Publication

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The Last Detail

Paul Kearney

The monsoon rains came early that year, as if the planet itself were tugging down a veil to hide its broken face. Even cowering in the bunker, the boy and his father could hear them, thunderous, massive, a roar of noise. But the rainstorm was nothing to that which had gone before – in fact even the bellowing of the monsoon seemed almost like a kind of silence.

‘It stopped,’ the boy said. ‘All the noise. Perhaps they went away.’

The man squeezed his son’s shoulder but said nothing. He had the wiry, etched face of a farmer, old before his time, but as hard as steel wire. Both he and his son had the sunken, hollow look of folk who have not eaten or drunk in days. He passed a dry tongue over his cracked lips at the sound of the rain, then looked at the flickering digits of the comms bench.

‘It’ll be dawn soon. When it comes, I’m going to look outside.’

The boy clenched him tighter. ‘Pa!’

‘It’ll be all right. We need water, or we won’t make it. I think they’ve gone, son.’ He ruffled his boy’s hair. ‘I think it’s over, whatever it was.’

‘They might be waiting.’

‘We need the water. It’ll be all right, you’ll see.’

‘I’m coming with you.’

The man hesitated a second, and then nodded. ‘All right then – whatever we find out there, we’ll meet it together.’

A summer dawn came early in the planet’s northern hemisphere. When the man set his shoulder to the bunker door only a few hours had passed. The heavy steel and plascrete door usually swung light and noiseless on its hinges, but now he had to throw himself at it to grind it open centimetre by centimetre. When the opening was wide enough for a man’s bicep, he stopped, and sniffed the air.

‘Get the respirators,’ he snapped to his son. ‘Now!’

They tugged on the cumbersome masks, and immediately their already enclosed world became tinier and darker still. They breathed heavily. The man coughed, took deep breaths.

‘Some kind of gas out there, a chemical agent – but it’s heavy. It’s seeped down the stairs and pooled there. We’ve got to go up.’ He looked round himself at the interior of the bunker with its discarded blankets, the dying battery-fed lights and useless comms unit. A pale mist was pouring in through the opened door almost like a kind of liquid, and with it, the gurgling rainwater of the passing monsoon.

‘This place is compromised,’ he said. ‘We have to get out now, or we’ll die here.’

They pushed together at the door. It squealed open angrily, until at last there was a kind of light filtering down on them from above. The man looked up. ‘Well, the house is gone,’ he said calmly.

They clambered over wet piles of debris which choked the stone stairs, until at last they stood at the top.

Inside a ruin. Two walls still stood, constructed out of the sturdy local stone, but that was all. The rest was blasted rubble. The clay tiles of the roof lay everywhere, and the boy saw his favourite toy, a wooden rifle his father had carved for him, lying splintered by what had been their front door. The rain was easing now, but he still had to rub the eyepieces of his respirator clear every few seconds.

‘Stay here,’ the man said. He walked forward, out of the shadows of their ruined home, his boots crunching and clinking on broken glass and plastic, splashing through puddles. Around them, the pale mist was receding. A wind was blowing, and on it the rain came down, washing everything clean. The man hesitated, then pulled off his respirator. He raised his face to the sky and opened his mouth, feeling the rain on his tongue.

‘It’s all right,’ he said to his son. ‘The air is clean now. Take it off, boy, but don’t touch anything. We don’t know what’s contaminated.’

All around them for as far as the eye could see, the countryside which had once been their farm, a green and pleasant place, was now a stinking marsh of shell-holes. The trunks of trees stood up like black sword-blades, their branches stripped away, the bark burnt from their boles. Here and there, one of their cattle, or a piece of one, lay bloated and green and putrid. Smoke rose in black pillars along the horizon.

Such was their thirst that they had nothing to say, but stood with their tongues out trying to soak up the rain. It streamed into the boy’s mouth, reinvigorating him. Nothing in his life had ever felt so good as that cold water sinking into his parched mouth. He opened his eyes at last, and frowned, then pointed skywards, at the broken wrack of clouds which the wind was lashing across the sky.

‘Pa, look,’ he said, eyes wide with wonder. ‘Look at that– it’s like a cathedral up-ended in the clouds.’

His father looked skywards, narrowed his eyes, and curled a protective arm about the boy’s shoulders. Many kilometres away, but still dominating the heavens, a vast angular shape hung shining above the earth, all jagged with steeples and adornments and improbable spikes. It broke out in a white flash as the sun caught it turning, and then began to recede, in a bright flare of afterburners. After a few seconds they caught the distant roar of its massive engines. As the sun rose higher, so they lost sight of it in the gathering brightness of the morning.

‘It’s moving out of orbit,’ the man said.

‘What is it – is the God-Emperor inside it, Pa?’

‘No, son.’ The father’s arm curled tighter about his son’s shoulders. ‘It is the vessel of those who know His face. It is the Emperor’s Angels, here in our sky.’

The man looked around him. At the reeking desolation, the craters, the puddled steaming meres of chemicals.

‘We were their battleground,’ he said.

They ranged over what was left of the farm during the next few days, setting out containers to catch rainwater, gathering up what remained of their canned goods, and throwing away anything which the man’s rad-counter began creaking at. At night they made camp in the ruins of the farmhouse and coaxed fire out of the soaked timbers which had once upheld its roof.

‘Is the whole world like this?’ the boy asked, gazing into the firelight one night, huddled under an old canvas tarp that the rain beat upon.

‘Could be,’ his father said. ‘Perreken is a small place, not much more than a moon. Wouldn’t take much to trash the whole thing.’

‘Why would the Emperor’s Angels do this to us?’ the boy asked.

‘They do things for reasons we can’t fathom,’ his father told him. ‘They are the Wrath of the Emperor made real, and when their anger sweeps a world, no-one escapes it, not even those they are sworn to save. They are our protectors, boy, but also, they are the Angels of Death.’

‘What are they like – have you ever seen one, Pa?’

The man shook his head. ‘Not I. I did my spell in the militia same as most, and that’s as far as my knowledge of things warlike goes. I don’t think they ever even came close to this system before. But that was a big Imperial ship in the sky the other morning, I’m sure of it – I seen pictures when I was your age. Only they ride in ships like that – the Astartes – the Angels of the God-Emperor.’

Three days later the boy and his father were trudging through the black shattered crag north of their farm which had once been a wooded hillside, looking to see if any of their stock had by some chance survived the holocaust. Here, there had been a rocky knoll some two hundred metres in height, which gave a good view down the valley beyond to the city and its spaceport. It seemed the hill had been bombed heavily, its conical head now flattened. Smoke still hissed out of cracks in the hillside, as molten rocks cooled underground. Out towards the horizon, the city smoked and flickered with pinpoints of flame.

‘Pa! Pa!’ the boy shouted, running and tumbling among the rocks – ‘Look here!’

‘Don’t touch it!’

‘It’s – it’s – I don’t know what it is.’

Looming over them was a hulk of massive, shattered metal, a box of steel and ceramite broken open and still sparking and glowing in places. It had legs like those of a crab, great pincers, and the barrels of autocannon on its shoulders. Atop it was what might once have been a man’s head, grotesquely attached, snarling in death. It was a machine which was almost an animal, or an animal which had become a machine. Carved onto the bullet-pocked carcass of the thing were unspeakable scenes of slaughter and perversity, and it was hung with rotting skulls, festooned with spikes and chains.

‘Come away,’ the man told his son hoarsely. ‘Get away from it.’

They backed away, and were suddenly aware that all down the slope below them were other remnants of battle. Bodies, everywhere, most of them shaven-headed, snarling, mutilated men, many with a pointed star cut into their foreheads. Here and there a bulkier figure in heavy armour, horned helmets, dismembered limbs, entrails underfoot about which the flies buzzed in black clouds.

‘They fought here,’ the man said. ‘They fought here for the high ground.’

The boy, with the curiosity of youth, seemed less afraid than his father. He had found a large firearm, almost as long as himself, and was trying to lift it out of its glutinous glue of mud and blood.

‘Leave that alone!’

‘But Pa!’

‘That’s an Astartes weapon.’ The man knelt and peered at it, wiping the metal gingerly with one gloved hand. ‘Look – see the double-headed eagle on the barrel – that’s the badge of the Imperium. The Space Marines fought here, on this hill. These are the dead of the great enemy lying around us, heretics cursed by the Emperor. The Astartes saved us from them.’

‘Saved us,’ the boy repeated grumpily. He pointed at the burning city down in the valley. ‘Look at Dendrekken. It’s all burnt and blown up.’

‘Better that than under the fist of the Dark Powers, believe me,’ the man said, straightening. ‘It’s getting dark. We’ve come far enough for one day. Tomorrow we’ll try and get down to the city, and see who else is left.’

That night, shivering beside their campfire amid the bodies of the dead, the boy lay awake staring at the night sky. The clouds had cleared, and he was able to see the familiar constellations overhead. Now and again he saw a shooting star, and now and again he was sure he saw other things gliding in the dark between the stars. New constellations glittered, moving in formation. He found himself wondering about those who lived out there in that blackness, travelling in their city-sized ships from system to system, bearing the eagle of the Imperium, carrying weapons like the massive bolter he had found upon the battlefield. What must it be like, to live like that?

He got up in the middle hours of the night, too restless and hungry for sleep. Stepping away from the fire, he clicked on his little battered torch, an old wind-up contraption he had had since he was a toddler. He walked out upon the rocky, blasted slope upon which the bodies of the dead lay contorted and rotting, and felt no fear, only a sense of wonder, and a profound restlessness. He picked his way down the slope and apart from his yellow band of torchlight there was no other radiance in the world save for the stars.

And one other thing. Off to his left he caught sight of something which came and went, an infinitesimal red glow. Intrigued, he made his way towards it, sliding his knife out of the sheath at his waist. He crouched and padded forwards, as quiet as when hunting in these same hills with his father’s old lasgun. Several times the light died altogether, but he was patient, and waited until he could see it again. It was at the foot of a looming, broken crag which stood up black against the stars.

Something half-buried in rubble, but still with a shine to it that reflected back the torchlight. It was a helmet, huge, fit for a giant. It looked almost like a massive skull. In the eye-sockets were two lenses, one cracked and broken, and the other with that flickering scarlet light oozing out of it. The boy knelt down and gently tapped the helmet with the butt of his knife. There was a hiss of static, and the thing moved slightly, making him spring backwards in fright. He saw then that it was not just a helmet. Buried in the fallen stone there was a body attached to the helm. Off to one side lay a massive hemispherical shape – the boy could have sat in it – and painted upon it in white was the symbol of a double-headed axe. A shoulder-guard made for a giant.

The boy scraped and scratched frantically at the stones, levering away the looser ones, uncovering more and more of the buried figure. There was a gleam of silver below the helm, and he saw that he had unearthed shining wings engraved upon a mighty breastplate, and in the centre of the wings, a skull emblem. He stared, open-mouthed. This was no Chaos fiend, no armoured heretic. He had found one of them, one of the Astartes his father talked about.

A fallen angel, he thought.

‘Pa!’ he shouted. ‘Pa, come here quick and see this!’

It took them most of the remainder of the night to uncover the buried giant. As dawn broke, and the relentless rain began again, so the water washed the mud and caked filth and blood from its armour, making it gleam in the sunrise. Dark blue metal, as dark as an evening sky, save for the white silver wings on the chest. The boy and his father knelt, panting before it. The armour was dented and broken in places, and loose wiring sprang out of gashes in the metal. There were bullet-holes in the thigh, and here and there plates had been buckled out of shape by some inconceivable force, bent out of place; the heavy dark paint scraped off them so they could see the bare alloy underneath.

The boy’s father wiped his brow, streaking it with mud. ‘Help me with the helmet, boy – let’s see if we can get a look at him.’

They felt around the helmet seal with their fingertips, that savage visage staring up at them, immobile. The boy’s quicker fingers found the two pressure points first. There were two clicks, and a hiss, then a loud crack. Between the two of them they levered up the mass of metal, and eased it off. It rolled to one side, clinking on the stones, and they found themselves staring at the face of an Astartes.

The skin was pale, as though it seldom saw the sun, stretched tight across a huge-boned skull, long and somehow horse-like. It was recognisably human, but out of scale, like the face of a great statue. A metal stud was embedded above one colourless eyebrow. The head was shaved, criss-crossed with old scars, though a bristle of dark hair had begun to regrow on it. The right eye was gone – he had been shot through the lens of his helmet – but the hole was already healed, a ragged whorl of red tissue.

Then the left eye opened.

The boy and his father tumbled backwards, away from the glare of the eye. The giant stirred, his arm coming up and then falling back again. A rasping growl came up from somewhere deep in the barrel-wide chest, and the legs quivered. Then the giant groaned, and was still again, but now his teeth were bared and clenched – white, strong teeth which looked as though they could snap off a hand. He spoke, a slur of pain-filled words.

The boy’s father approached the giant on hands and knees. ‘You’re among friends here. We’re trying to help you, lord. The fighting is over. The enemy is gone. Can you hear me?’

The eye, bloodshot and as blue as midwinter ice, came to rest on the boy’s father. ‘My brothers,’ the giant said. ‘Where are they?’ His voice was deep, the accent so strange that the boy could barely understand him.

‘They’ve gone. I saw the great ship leave orbit myself, six days ago.’

A deep snarl, a cross between rage and grief. Again, the helpless movement of the massive limbs.

‘Help me. I must stand.’

They tried, tugging at the cold metal armour. They managed to get him sitting upright. His gauntleted hand scrabbled at the rubble.

‘My bolter.’

‘It’s not here – it must be buried, as you were. We had to dig you out.’

He could not raise himself. The single eye blinked. The Astartes spat, and his spittle spattered against the rocks, bright with blood.

‘My armour is dead. We must get it off. Help me. I will show you what to do.’

The rain came lashing down. They struggled in the muck and gravel around the giant, clicking off one piece after another of the armour which enclosed him. The boy could not lift any of them, strong though he was. His father grunted and sweated, corded muscles standing out along his arms and chest, as he set each piece of the dark blue carapace to one side. The massive breastplate almost defeated them all, and when it came free the giant snarled with pain. As it fell away, slick, mucus-covered cables slid out of his torso along with it, and when they sucked free, the boy saw that his chest was pocked with metal sockets embedded in his very flesh. The armour had been part of him.

He had been shot through the thigh, but the wound was almost closed. It was a raised, angry lump, in the midst of which was a suppurating hole. The Astartes looked at it, frowning. ‘Something’s in there. My system should have fixed it by now.’ He probed the hole with one finger, teeth bared against the pain, and raised his bloody pus-covered digit to his face and sniffed at it. ‘Something bad.’ He put a knuckle to his empty eye-socket. ‘It feels hot. I have infection in me.’ His voice held a note of incredulity. ‘This should not be.’ He thought for a moment. ‘They used chemical agents in the fighting. Maybe biological too. It would seem my system has been compromised.’

The Astartes looked at the man who knelt by him. ‘I must rejoin my brethren. I need a deep space comms link. Do you know where there would be such a thing?’

The boy’s father tugged at his lower lip. ‘In the city, at the spaceport I suppose. But the city is pretty much destroyed. There may be nothing left.’

The Astartes nodded again. Something like humanity came into his surviving eye. ‘I remember. Our deep strike teams made planetfall not far from the landing fields. The Thunderhawks took out positions all up and down the pads. They had drop-ships there, three of them. We got them all.’

‘Who were they, lord, if I might ask?’

The Astartes smiled, though the effect was less humorous than ferocious on that massive, brutal face. ‘Those who brought us here were the enemies of Man – a Chaos faction my Chapter has been charged with eradicating for decades now. They call themselves the Punishers. They meant to take over your world and use it as a bridgehead to conquer the rest of the system. My brothers and I saved you from that fate.’

‘You destroyed my world,’ the boy said, high and shrill with anger. ‘You didn’t save anything – you burnt us to ash!’

The giant regarded him gravely. ‘Yes, we did. But I promise you that the Punishers would have done worse, had they been allowed. Your people would have been cattle to them, mere sport for the vilest appetites imaginable. Those who died quickly would have been the lucky ones. You will rebuild your world – it may take twenty years, but you can do it. Had it been tainted by Chaos, there would have been nothing for it but to scald it down to the very guts of the planet, and leave it an airless cinder.’

The man grasped his son’s arm. ‘He’s young – he knows nothing.’

‘Well, consider this part of his education,’ the Astartes snapped. ‘Now find me something we can use to splint my leg – and something to lean on that will take my weight. I must get mobile – and I need a weapon.’

Their search took much of the day, until finally they hit upon dismantling one of the discarded weapons lying on the battlefield and using the recoil rod within the firing mechanism to splint the Astartes’s thigh. As he tied it tight about his lacerated flesh with lengths of wire, the giant ground his teeth, and pus popped out of the hot red wound in his leg. The boy’s father retrieved the Imperium weapon his son had found the day before. The Astartes’s eyes lit up as he saw it, then narrowed again as he popped the magazine and checked the seat of the rounds within. ‘Maybe thirty, if we’re lucky. Well, a working bolter is worth something. Now hand me that pole.’

The pole was part of the innards of one of the great biomechanical carcasses which littered the field. The Astartes regarded it with disgust, wiping it clean with wet soil and sand. He used it as a staff, and was finally able to lever himself upright. In his free fist he held the bolter. He found its weight hard to manage in his weakened state however, and so fashioned a sling from more gleaned wire so that he might let it swing at his side. The wire of the sling cut into his shoulder, slicing the skin, but he seemed not to feel the pain.

‘It’ll be dark soon,’ the boy’s father said. ‘We should perhaps stay here another night and then set off at dawn.’

‘No time,’ the Astartes said. Now that he was upright he seemed even huger, half as tall again as the man in front of him, his hands as big as shovels, his chest as wide as a dining table. ‘I see in the dark. You can follow me.’ With that, he set off, hobbling down the slopes of the shattered hillside to the valley below, where the sun was setting in a maelstrom of black cloud and toiling pillars of even blacker smoke, still rising from the stricken city that was their destination.

They walked half the night. The ground they traversed was broken by great bombardments and littered with the wreckage of war machines, some tracked, some wheeled, and some it seemed fashioned with arms and legs. They stopped once beside a great burnt-out carcass which squatted as tall as a building. So shot to pieces was it that its original shape could hardly be made out, but the Astartes limped up to it and carefully, reverently clicked off a metal seal with a tattered remnant of parchment still clinging to it. He bowed his head over this relic. ‘Ah, brother,’ he whispered.

‘What is it?’ the boy asked, even as his father tried to hush him.

‘One of my battle-brothers; a spirit so bold, so fine, he chose to be encased in this mighty Dreadnought after his own body was destroyed, to carry on the fight, to stay with us, his brethren. His friends. His name was Geherran. He was with my company, and saved us from these–’ Here the Astartes gestured at the other wrecks which stood round about, evil, crab-like structures adorned with all manner of ordnance, emblazoned with sickening symbols, ‘–these defilers. Abominations of Chaos. He broke them, took their heaviest fire upon himself so we might bring them down one by one.’

The Astartes blinked his one eye, then straightened, and limped on without another word.

The boy and his father followed him through a graveyard of the great machines, awed by their size, and the way in which they had been blasted to pieces where they stood. As the planet’s two moons began to rise, it seemed they were in the midst of some ancient arena, where the dead had been left forgotten in mounds about them. But the dead were all twisted, snarling, white-faced and putrid. In the moons’ light, it did not do to look at them too closely.

They entered the suburbs of the city and began to encounter signs of life. Rats flickered and squealed amid avalanches of rubble, and here and there a dog growled at them from the deepest shadows, eyes alight with madness, luminous foam dripping from its jaws. Once, a stream of cockroaches, each as big as a man’s fist, went chittering across their path, dragging some unidentifiable chunk of carrion with them as they went. The Astartes watched them go thoughtfully, hefting the bolter.

‘Such creatures are not native to this world, am I right?’

The boy’s father was wide-eyed. ‘Not that I have heard.’

‘Something has been happening here. My brothers would not have left this world again so quickly unless there was a good reason. My guess is something called them out of orbit. A secondary threat of some kind.’

‘You think they destroyed all the enemy down here on the surface?’

‘We do not leave jobs half done.’

‘How do you know?’ the boy piped up. ‘You were buried under a ton of stone, dead to the world. They left you behind.’

The Astartes turned, and in his eye they could see a light not unlike that in the dog’s caught by lamplight. But he said nothing. The boy was cuffed across the back of his head by his father.

They moved on, more slowly now, for the Astartes was straining to keep his massive firearm at the ready. An ordinary man would struggle to lift, let alone fire it. His metal staff clicked against the plascrete underfoot, and stones skittered aside as his feet found their way. Watching him, the boy realised that the giant was near the end of his strength, and now he noticed also that the Astartes was leaving a thickly stippled trail of dark liquid in his wake. He was bleeding to death. He pointed this out to his father, who grasped up at the giant’s arm.

‘Your leg – you must let me look at it.’

‘My systems should have taken care of it. I am infected. Some kind of bio-agent. I can feel it in my skull, like red-hot worms writhing behind my eyes. I need an Apothecary.’ The Astartes was panting heavily. ‘How far to the spaceport?’

‘Another four or five kilometres.’

‘Then I will rest, for now. We must find somewhere to lay up until daylight. I don’t like this place, these ruins. There is something here.’

‘No bodies,’ the boy said, making his companions stare at him. He shrugged. ‘Where are all the dead people? There’s nothing but vermin left.’

‘Lean on me,’ the boy’s father said to the ailing giant. ‘There are houses on our right, up ahead, and they look more intact. We’ll find one with a roof.’

By they time they bedded down for what remained of the darkness the Astartes was shivering uncontrollably, though his skin was almost too hot to touch. They gathered rainwater out of puddles and broken crockery and sipped enough of the black, disgusting liquid to moisten their mouths. The air was full of smoke and soot which left a gritty taste on the tongue and there were sparks flying in the midst of the reek.

‘The fires are up north, towards the spaceport,’ the boy’s father said, rubbing his aching shoulder.

The Astartes nodded. He stroked the bolter in his lap as though it comforted him. ‘It may be best if I go on alone,’ he said.

‘My other shoulder is still good enough to lean on.’

The giant smiled. ‘What are you, a farmer?’

‘I was. I had cattle. Now I have rocks and ash.’

‘And a son, who still lives.’

‘For now,’ the man said, and he looked at the filthy, pinched face of his son, who lay sleeping like an abandoned orphan, wrapped in the charred rags of a blanket on the floor.

‘Think of him, then – you have accompanied me far enough.’

‘Yes,’ the boy’s father said dryly. ‘And you are in such tremendous shape. You want rid of us because you think something bad is up ahead, at the spaceport, and you want to spare us.’

The giant inclined his head. ‘Fighting is my life, not yours.’

‘Something tells me this thing is not over. Your brothers overlooked something when they left. This is my world we are on – I will help you fight for it. There is nothing behind me but burnt earth, anyway.’

‘So be it,’ the Astartes said. ‘At daybreak we will walk out together.’

Daybreak did not come. Instead there was only a slight lightening of the darkness, and in the sky ahead, a glow which had nothing to do with the colour of flame. The two moons were setting amid oceans of smoke, and the smoke itself was tinted on its underside, a colour like the underbelly of a maggot.

The Astartes rose unaided. His remaining eye seemed to have sunk into his skull, so that it was but a single gimlet gleam in his soot-blackened face. He cast aside his iron staff and stood upright as the pus ran yellow and pink from his swollen leg. The agony of it brought the sweat running down his forehead, but his face was impassive, at peace.

‘The Emperor watch over us,’ he said quietly as the boy and his father rose in turn, rubbing their smarting eyes. ‘We must be quick and quiet now, like hunters.’

The three set off.

The scream burst ahead of them like a fire in the night, a tearing shriek which rose to the limits of human capacity, and then was cut off. There was a murmur, as of a distant engine, heavy machinery moving. And when it stopped they heard another sound, murmuring through the heavy smoke and the preternatural darkness. Voices, many voices chanting in unison.

The three of them went to ground in a burning house as the gledes and coals of the rafters spat and showered them. Some hissed as they landed on the sweat of the Astartes’s back, but he did not so much as twitch.

‘Cultists,’ he said, listening. ‘They’re at the work of the warp, some ceremony or sorcery.’

His two companions stared at him, uncomprehending.

‘Followers of the Dark Powers,’ he explained, ‘gulled or tortured into subservience. They are fodder for our guns.’ Carefully, he unloaded the magazine from his bolter, eyed the rounds, and then kissed the cold metal before reloading. He eased back the cocking handle with a double click, like the lock of a door going back and forth.

‘How far to the spaceport now?’

‘We’re almost on it,’ the man told him. He was gripping his son’s shoulder until his knuckles showed white. ‘Up ahead the road turns to the right, and there’s a gate, and walls – the spaceport is within.’

‘I doubt the walls still stand,’ the Astartes said with grim humour.

‘There’s a guardpost and a small barracks for the militia just within the gate – and an armoury out back, by the control tower. Ammunition, lasguns.’

‘Lasguns,’ the Astartes said with a kind of contempt. ‘I am used to heavier metal, my friend. But it may be worth checking out. We need something to up our killing power. From here in, you stay close to me, both of you.’

He sprang up, and was off with barely a limp. With astonishing speed he sprinted to the end of the street and disappeared into the shell of the last house on the right. After a moment’s hesitation, the man and his son got up and followed him.

He was right – the walls had been blasted away. In fact most of the buildings on this side of the spaceport lay in ruins, and the landing pads themselves were cratered with massive shell-holes and littered with the debris of all sorts of orbital craft. At the western end, three tall towers of twisted wreckage stood out, the smoke wreathing them, fires still burning deep in their tangled hulls.

‘Punisher drop pods’ the Astartes said. ‘We got all three.’

‘There’s another one,’ the boy spoke up, pointing.

They peered together, squinting in the smoke. The boy was right. A fourth, undamaged drop pod was squatting to the east, where the damage to the landing pads was less severe. Infantry was marching down its ramps.

The Astartes’s face creased with hatred. ‘It would seem my brothers and I were not as thorough as we thought. We must get word to my company, or your planet will fall to the enemy after all. We must have comms!’

‘It’ll be in the control tower, out yonder – if it’s still intact,’ the man said, jerking his head to the north. Dimly through the smoke they could make out a pale white pillar with a cluster of grey plascrete buildings around its foot. There seemed to be no enemy activity out in that direction, but with the smoke and gathering darkness it was hard to be sure.

‘Then that is where we go,’ the Astartes said simply. ‘My brothers must be brought back to this world to cleanse it – or else they will have to extinguish it from space – get down!’ This last was in a hiss. A troop of enemy infantry marched past. Strange, angular bald-headed men with heavily tattooed faces. They wore long leather coats adorned with studs and chains and what seemed to be human body parts. They bore lasguns, and chattered and snarled incessantly as they passed by.

‘Their talk hurts my ears,’ the boy said, rubbing his head.

‘The warp infects them,’ the Astartes told him. ‘If we cannot cleanse this place, then it will begin to infect the remainder of your people.’ He lifted a hand to the wound where his eye had been, then dropped it again. ‘To the tower, then.’

They ran, right into the heart of the foul-smelling smoke. The boy became dizzy, and found it hard to breathe, and the distant chanting of the cultists seemed to cloud over his thinking. He faltered, and found himself standing still, staring vacantly, aware that he was missing something.

Then he found himself lifted into the air and crushed against an enormous, fever-hot body. The Astartes had picked him up and tucked him under his free arm, still running.

Out of nowhere a cluster of pale faces appeared in the smoke. Before they could even raise their weapons the Astartes was upon them. A kick broke the ribcage of one and sent him hurtling off into the darkness. The heavy bolter was swung like a club and smashed the heads of two more into red ruin, almost decapitating them. The fourth got off a red burst of lasgun fire that spiked out harmlessly into the air, before the Astartes, dropping the boy, had him by the throat. He crushed the man’s windpipe with one quick clench of his fist, and tossed him aside.

‘Get the weapons,’ he said to the man and the boy, panting. ‘Grenades, anything.’ He bent over and coughed, and a gout of dark liquid sprayed out of his mouth to splatter all over the plascrete landing strip. He swayed for a second, then straightened. When his companions had retrieved two lasguns and a sling of grenades from the bodies he nodded. ‘Someone may have seen that las-fire. If we run into more of them, do not stop – keep running.’

They set off again. The giant was hobbling now, and left a trail of blood behind him, but he still set a fearsome pace, and it was all the man and his son could do to keep up with him, as they fought for air in the reeking hell that surrounded them.

At last the white pillar of the control tower appeared out of the smoke – and a band of cultists at its foot. They saw the shapes come running out of the darkness at them and set up a kind of shriek and began firing wildly. Las-fire came arcing through the air.

In return the Astartes halted, set the bolter in his shoulder, and began firing.

Short bursts, no more, two or three rounds at a time. But when the heavy ordnance hit the cultists it blew them apart. He took down eight of them before the first las-burst hit him, in the stomach. He staggered, and the bolter-muzzle dropped, but a second later he had raised it again and blew to pieces the cultist who had shot him.

The boy and his father lay on the ground and started firing also, but the heavy Chaos lasguns were unwieldy and hard to handle – their shots went wild. The boy fumbled with the sling of grenades and popped out one thumb-sized bomb. There was a tiny red button at the top of the little cylinder. He pressed it, and then tossed the thing at the cultists. It clinked on the base of the tower and lay at their feet. One looked at it with dawning horror on his face, and then the grenade exploded, and splattered him in scarlet fragments across the white painted wall of the control tower, along with three of his comrades.

The rest broke and ran, quickly disappearing into the toiling darkness. The Astartes sank to one knee, leaning on his bolter. His other hand was bunched in a fist where the lasgun had burnt a black hole through his torso from front to back.

‘You need my shoulder again, I think,’ the man said, helping up the maimed giant. ‘Not far to go now. Lean on me, my friend. I will get you there.’

The Astartes managed a strangled laugh, but said no more.

They found the door ajar, a tall steel affair whose command-box had been blown out. The man made as if to enter but the Astartes held him back. ‘Grenade first,’ he rasped.

The boy tossed another of the little explosives inside. He was smiling as he did so, and when the thing went off, he laughed.

‘I am glad everyone finds this so amusing,’ his father said, as he stepped inside.

Two dead bodies, blown to pieces in the confined chamber at the base of the tower. There was an elevator, but the boy punched its buttons in vain.

‘No power, Pa,’ he said. ‘The whole place is dead.’

‘Stairs,’ the Astartes gasped.

‘Listen,’ the man said. ‘Outside – can you hear it?’

A confused babel, a roaring, bellowing sound of voices, some shrill, some deep. Even as they listened, it grew louder.

‘Get the door closed,’ the Astartes snapped. ‘Block it, jam it – use anything you can.’

They slammed the heavy steel door shut, and piled up whatever they could find in the way of wreckage and furniture against it. The Astartes, with an agonised cry, wrenched a stretch of iron piping free of the wall and wedged it against the steel. Seconds later, the cacophony of voices was right outside, and they were hammering on the door. Gunfire sounded, and shells rang loudly against the metal.

That won’t hold them,’ the man said. He and his son were white-faced, and sweat was cutting stripes down the grime on their faces.

‘Up,’ the Astartes said impatiently. ‘We must go up. You first, then your boy. I will hold the rear. Any sounds ahead of you, start firing and keep firing.’

‘We’re trapped here,’ the man said unsteadily.

‘Move!’ the giant barked.

The stairs wound round the inside of the tower like the thread of a screw. They laboured up them in almost pitch darkness, the sound of their own harsh breathing magnified by the plascrete to left and right, their feet sounding hollow on the metal steps. Several times the Astartes paused to listen as they ascended, and once he ordered them to halt.

‘Anyone got a light?’ he asked.

‘I have,’ the boy said. There was a whirring sound, and then a feeble glow began, yellow and flickering. It strengthened as the boy kept winding up his torch.

‘Good for you,’ the Astartes said. ‘Give me those grenades.’ He popped one out of the sling and peered at it.

‘They copy us in everything – these are just like Imperium charges. They have three settings: instant, delay and proximity. The most obvious one is delay, the red button on top – give thanks to the Emperor you picked that one back outside. You twist the top of the cylinder for the other settings.’ He did so. ‘Move up the stairs.’ He set down the little cylinder upright, pressed the red button on its top, and then followed them. Behind him there were three tiny clicks, and then silence.

‘The next thing to approach that is going to have a surprise. I just hope there are no rats in here. Move out.’

Round the tower they went by the flickering glow of the boy’s clockwork torch. Finally they came to another steel door. It was very slightly ajar, and there were voices on the far side. The boy reached for the grenades, but the Astartes stopped him. ‘We need this place intact. Get behind me.’

He kicked open the door and there was a roar of bolter fire, a stuttering series of flashes, and then a click as the bolter’s magazine came up empty. The Astartes roared and lunged forward.

Behind him, the boy and his father burst through the doorway, coughing on the cordite stink that filled the space beyond. They were in a large circular room filled with consoles and monitors, with huge windows that overlooked the entire spaceport. A trio of cultists lay dead, their innards scattered like red streamers across the electronic wall-consoles of the tower. On the far side of the room, a titanic battle was raging, smashing back and forth, sending chairs flying, filling the air with broken glass. The Astartes was struggling with a dark, armoured figure almost as massive as himself, and the two were grappling with each other, bellowing like two bulls intent on mayhem. The boy and his father stood staring, lasguns almost forgotten in their hands.

The Astartes was knocked clear across the room. He crashed into the heavy blast-proof glass of the tower and the impact spidered it out in a web of cracks. His adversary straightened, and there was the sound of horrible, unhinged laughter.

‘Brother Marine!’ the voice gargled, ‘You have not come dressed for the occasion! Where is your blue livery now, Dark Hunter? Can’t you see you are on the wrong world? This place is ours now!’

The speaker was clad in power armour similar to that they had found the Astartes wearing, but it was bone-white in colour, and a black skeleton had been picked out upon it with ebony inlays. Its bearer wore a helm adorned with two great horns, and the light from his eye sockets glowed sickening green. The many-arrowed star of Chaos had been engraved on his breastplate, and in his hand he held a cruel monomolecular blade which shone with blood.

‘How many of you are left now, heretic?’ the Adeptus Astartes spat. ‘My brothers will wipe you from this system as a man wipes shit from the sole of his boot.’

‘Big words, from the mouth of a cripple,’ the Chaos warrior snarled. He drew a bolt pistol from its holster and aimed it at the Astartes’s head.

The boy and his father both raised their lasguns and fired in the same moment. The man missed, but his son’s burst caught the enemy warrior just under the armpit. The fearsome figure cried out in pain and anger, and dropped the knife. The pistol swung round.

‘What are these, brother – pets of yours? They need chastising.’

He opened fire. The pistol bucked in his hand and the impact of the heavy rounds sent the boy’s father smashing back against the wall behind, ripping open his chest and filling the air with gore. The Chaos warrior stepped forward, still firing, and the bolter shells blew open the wall in a line of explosions as he followed the flight of the boy, who had dropped his lasgun and was scrabbling on hands and knees for the shelter of the consoles. The magazine clicked dry, and the warrior flicked it free, reaching in his belt for another one. ‘Such vermin on this world – they must be exterminated to the last squealing morsel.’

‘I agree,’ the Astartes said.

The Chaos warrior spun round, and was staggered backwards by the force of the blow. He fell full length on his back. Dropping his pistol, his hands came up to his chest to find the hilt of his knife buried in his own breastplate. There was a thin, almost inaudible whine as the filament blade continued to vibrate deep in his body cavity.

The Astartes, his face a swollen mask of blood, dropped to his knees beside his prone enemy.

‘We have two hearts each, you and me,’ he said. ‘That is how we are made. We were created for the betterment of man, to make this galaxy a place of order and peace.’ He gripped the knife blade, slapping his struggling adversary’s hands aside, and pulled the weapon free. A thin jet of blood sprang out, and the Chaos warrior grunted in agony.

‘Let me see if I can find that second heart,’ the Astartes said, and he plunged the knife downwards again.

The boy crept out of his hiding place and crouched by the mangled remains of his father. His face was blank, wide eyes in a filthy blood-spattered mask. He closed his father’s staring eyes and clenched his own teeth on a sob. The he stood up and retrieved his lasgun.

The Astartes was lying by the wall in a pool of his own blood, his dead enemy sprawled beside him. His body was white as ivory, and the blood leaking from his wounds had slowed to a trickle. He looked up at the boy with his remaining eye. They stared at one another for a moment.

‘Help me up,’ the Astartes said at last, and the boy somehow climbed behind him and pushed his immense torso upright.

‘Your father–’ the Astartes began, and then there was a dull boom from below them.

‘The grenade,’ the boy said dully. ‘They’re on the stairs.’

‘Toss another one down there and then lock the door,’ the Astartes said. ‘Bring me over that bolt pistol when you’re done.’

‘What’s the point?’ the boy asked, sullen. His eyes were red and bloodshot. He looked like a little old man, shrunken and defeated.

‘Do as I say,’ the Astartes cracked out, glaring. ‘It’s not over while we live, not for us, not for your world. Now toss the grenade!’

The boy looked round the door.

‘There’s movement on the stairs,’ he said, calm now. He pressed the red button on the explosive and threw it down the stairs. It bounced and clinked and clicked as it went down the steps. He shut the heavy metal door and slid the bar-lock in place. Another boom, closer than the first. There were screams below them, and the floor quivered. The boy handed the Astartes the bolt pistol, and the giant ripped the ammo belt off the fallen Chaos Marine, clicking in a fresh magazine and cocking the weapon.

‘I’ve found the comms,’ the boy said, across the room. He flicked several switches up and down. ‘At least I think so – it looks like a comms unit anyway. But it’s dead. There’s no power.’

The Astartes laboured over to the boy on his hands and knees. Blood dripped out of his mouth and nose and ears. He sounded as though he were breathing through water.

‘Yes, that’s it. Old-fashioned. But it still needs power.’ He sighed deeply. ‘Well, that’s that then.’

The boy stared at the dead lights on the console. He was frowning. He did not even start when the first battering began on the door to the control room, and a slavering and snarling on the other side of it, as though a herd of beasts milled there.

‘Power,’ he said. ‘I have power – I have power here.’ His face quickened. ‘My torch!’

He drew it out of the bag of oddments at his waist. ‘I can attach it – I can plug it in and get it running!’

The Astartes drew himself up and sat on the creaking chair before the console. ‘A fine idea, but you’ll never crank up enough power with that little hand-held dynamo.’

‘There must be something!’

They stared at the dead array of lights and switches before them. The comms unit was a relic, a patched up antique for use on a far-flung border world. The Astartes’s good eye narrowed.

‘Plug in your torch and start winding,’ he said.

‘But–’

‘Just do it!’ He scrabbled open the wooden drawer below the console, while behind them both, blow after heavy blow was rained down on the door to the chamber. The lock-bar bent inwards. A chorus of cackles and growls sounded on the other side, like the memory of a fevered nightmare.

‘Sometimes they hang on to the most obsolete of technologies on worlds like yours,’ the Astartes said. He smiled. ‘Because they still work.’ From a tangle of junk in the drawer, he produced a contraption of wires and a small knobbed device. He stared at it, considering a moment, and then set it up on the bench, plugging it into the adaptor socket. Immediately, a small green light came on within it.

‘Built to last,’ he muttered. He closed his eye, and then began tapping down on the device. A high series of clicks and tones was audible. He adjusted the frequency with an ancient circular dial, and there was a faint crackle.

The two of them were so intent, the boy turning the handle on his creaking torch, the giant tapping away on the strange device, that they were almost oblivious to the grinding and banging at the room’s door.

‘Is it working?’ the boy asked.

‘The signal is going out. The code is ancient; a relic of old Earth, but we still use it in my Chapter, for its simplicity. It is elegant, older even than the Imperium itself. But like many simple, elegant things in this universe, it has endured.’

The Space Marine stopped his tapping. ‘Enough. We must see if we can get you out of here.’

‘There’s no way out,’ the boy said.

‘There’s always a way out,’ the Astartes told him. He turned and fired at the plexi-glass of the control tower. It shattered and cascaded in an avalanche of jagged shards. Then he reached into the console drawer with a fist and produced a long coil of dull coppery wire.

‘It will slice your hands as you go down,’ he said to the boy, ‘but you must hold on. When you get to the bottom, start running.’

‘What about you?’

The Space Marine smiled. ‘I will be on the other end. Now do it.’

The door burst open, and was flung back against the wall with a clang. A huge figure loomed out of the darkness, and more were behind it.

The Astartes was slumped by the huge broken maw of the plexiglass window, a glint of wire wrapped round one arm, disappearing into the smoky vacancy beyond. He bared his teeth in a rictus.

‘What kept you?’ he asked the hulking shapes as they advanced on him. Then he raised his free arm and fired a full magazine from the bolt pistol into the intruders. Screams and yowls rent the air, and the foremost two shapes were blasted off their feet.

But more were behind them. The howling mob in the doorway poured into the room, firing bolters as they came, the heavy rounds blasting everything to pieces.

Away from the tortured little world, the vastness of hanging space was utterly silent, peaceful, but in the midst of that peace tiny flowers of light bloomed, white and yellow, lasting only an instant before lack of oxygen snuffed them out. From a distance – a great distance – they seemed minute and beautiful, brief jewels in the blackness. Closer to, the story was different.

There were craft floating in the blackness, immense structures of steel and ceramite and titanium and a thousand other alloys, constructed with an eye to utility, to endurance. Made for destruction. They looked like vast airborne temples created for the worship of a deranged god, kilometres long, their flanks bristling with turrets and batteries. About them, smaller craft wheeled and dove like flycatchers on the hide of a rhino.

Within the largest of these craft an assemblage of giants stood clad in shining dark blue armour, unhelmed, their pale faces reflecting back the distant infernos that were on the viewscreens to their front. All around them, travesties of man and machine worked silently, murmuring into their stations, hands of flesh working in harmony with limbs of steel and muti-hued wiring. Incense hung in the air, mixed with the unmistakable fragrance of gun-oil.

‘You’re sure of this, brother?’ one of the giant figures said, not turning his head from the scenes of kinetic mayhem on the screens about him.

‘Yes, captain. The signal lasted only some forty-five seconds, but there was no doubting its content. Several of my comms-techs know the old code, as do the Adeptus Mechanicus. It is a survival from ancient days.’

‘And the content of the message?’

‘One phrase, repeated again and again. Captain, the phrase was Umbra Sumus.’

At this, all the standing figures started and turned towards the speaker. They were all two and a half metres high, clad in midnight-blue armour. All had the white symbol of the double-headed axe on one of their shoulderguards. They carried their helms in the crook of their arms, and bolt-pistols were holstered on their thighs.

‘Mardius, are you sure – that is what it said?’

‘Yes, captain. I have triple checked. The signal was logged and recorded.’

The captain drew in a sharp breath. ‘The motto of our order.’

‘We are shadows. Yes, captain. No Punisher would ever utter those words – the hatred they feel for the Dark Hunters is too great. It is my belief one or more of our brethren sent it from the surface of the planet; he was contacting us in the only way he could. Or warning us.’

‘The signal cut off, you say?’

‘It was very faint. It may have been cut off or it may merely have passed out of our range-width. We are too far away to scan the planet. The signal itself took the better part of ten days to reach us.’

‘Brother Avriel,’ the captain snapped. ‘Who was unaccounted for after we left the surface?’

Another of the giants stepped forward. ‘Brother Pieter. No trace was found of him. We would have searched longer, but–’

‘But the Punishers had to be pursued. Quite right, Avriel. No blame is attached to my query. It was the priority at the time.’ The captain stared up at one of the giant screens again. Within the massive nave of the starship, there was almost silence, except for the clicks and muttering of the adepts at their posts.

‘No other communications from planetside?’

‘None whatsoever, captain. Their infrastructure was comprehensively destroyed during our assault, and it was a backwater to begin with. One spaceport, and nothing but suborbital craft across the whole planet.’

‘Yes, yes, I am aware of the facts of the campaign, Avriel.’ The captain frowned, the studs on his brow almost disappearing in the folds of scarred flesh there. At last he looked up.

‘This engagement here is almost concluded. The Punisher flotilla has been crippled and well nigh destroyed. As soon as we have finished off the last of their strike craft we will turn about, and set a course for Perreken.’

‘Go back?’ one of the Astartes said. ‘But it’s been weeks. If it was Pieter–’

‘Avriel,’ the captain snapped, ‘What is our estimated journey time to the planet?’

‘At best speed, some thirty-six days, captain.’

‘Emperor guide us, that’s a long time to leave a Brother Marine alone,’ one of the others said.

‘We do this not just for our brother,’ the captain told them. ‘If any taint of Chaos has remained on the planet then it must be burnt out, or our mission in this system will have utterly failed. We return to Perreken, brothers – in force.’

The ceremony was almost complete. For weeks the cultists and their champions had danced and prayed and chanted and wept. Now their mission was close to its fruition. Across the plascrete of the landing pads, a dark stain had grown. This was no burn mark, no sear of energy weapon or bombardment crater. Within its shadow the ground bubbled like soup left too long on a stove. It steamed and groaned, cracking upwards, segments of plascrete floating on the unquiet surface. The screaming chant of the cultists reached a new level, one that human ears could barely comprehend. Hundreds of them were gathered around the unquiet, desecrated stain of earth.

‘Hold your fire until I give the word,’ the boy said, and up and down the line the order was passed along. In a series of impact craters to the east of the spaceport scores of men and women lay hidden by the broken rubble. They were a tatterdemalion band of ragged figures weighed down by bandoliers of ammunition and a bewildering assortment of weaponry, some modern and well-kept, some ancient and worn-out. Once, a long time ago it seemed now, they had been civilians, non-combatants. But now that distinction had ceased to exist on Perreken.

A black-bearded man who lay beside the boy was chewing on his thumbnail nervously. ‘If we’ve got this wrong, then all of us will die here today,’ he said.

‘That is why I didn’t get it wrong,’ the boy said. He turned to stare at his companion and the black-bearded man looked away, unable to meet those eyes.

Almost three months had passed since the boy had slid down a piece of wire held by a dead Space Marine. In that time he had broadened, grown taller, and yet more gaunt. The flesh of his face had been stripped back to the bone by hunger and exhaustion, and his eyes were blank with the look of a man who has seen too much. Despite his youth, no one questioned his leadership. It was as if his fellow fighters recognised something unique in him, something none of the rest of them possessed.

The boy held an Astartes bolt pistol in his hands, and as he lay there in the crater with the rank sweat of fear filling the air around him, he bent his head and kissed the double-headed eagle on the barrel. Then he fumbled in the canvas satchel at his side and produced a mess of wires and a little control panel. A green light burned on the heavy battery still in the satchel.

‘Send it,’ he said to the black-bearded man. ‘It’s time.’

His companion began tapping clicks out on the elderly wired contraption. ‘May the Emperor smile on us today,’ he muttered. ‘And may His Angels arrive on time.’

‘When the Astartes say they will do something, they do it,’ the boy said. ‘They gave their word. They will be here.’

Across the landing fields, the cultists were dancing and stamping and screaming their way into a frenzy. Some of the madly cavorting figures had once been smallholders and blacksmiths and businessmen, friends and neighbours of the ragged guerrillas who lay in wait among the craters to the east. Now they had been turned into chattels of the Dark Gods, worshippers of that which drew its strength from the warp. And now the warp had stirred them into a kind of ecstasy, and it fed off their worship, their blood-sacrifices. The patch of ground which they circled darkened further, popping and undulating as though cooked on some great invisible flame.

And inside that roiling cauldron, something stirred. There was a momentary glimpse of something breaking the surface, like the fin of a great whale at sea. The earth spat upwards, as though trying to escape whatever writhed beneath it. The cultists went into paroxysms, prostrating themselves, shrieking until the blood vessels in their throats burst and sprayed the air with their life fluids. Farther back from the edge, the armour-clad champions of their kind stood and stamped and clashed power swords against their breastplates. The darkness thickened over them all like a shroud.

The boy lay and watched them with his face disfigured by hatred and fear. Up and down the line there was a murmur as his fellow fighters brought their weapons into their shoulders. Some were priming homemade bombs, others were checking magazines. They were an underfed, rancid, ill-equipped band, but they held their position with real discipline, waiting for their young leader’s word.

I did that, the boy thought. I made them like this. I am good at it.

He could barely remember a time now when he had been a mere farm boy, living on a green planet where the skies were blue and there was fresh food to be had, clean water to drink. He could barely even remember his father. That boy who had known a father was someone else, from another time. All he could remember now was the endless smoke-shrouded landscape, the constant fear, the explosions of bloody violence, the carnage. And the face of the Astartes who had died while helping him to live. That, he could not forget.

Nor could he forget the moment of sheer bubbling joy and relief when the ancient comms device he had found in the city had proved to work as well as that which they had found in the control tower. One of the older men knew the ancient code by heart and taught it to him. When the first message had come clicking back at them from a far-flung starship on the other side of the system it had seemed like a benediction from the God-Emperor Himself. It was enough to engender hope, to help him recruit fighters from the shattered survivors of the population. They had lived like rats, scavenging, scurrying for weeks and then months in the ruins of their world. Until today. Today they would stand up and take it back.

That was the plan.

The boy clambered to his feet just as the battery-fed contraption in the satchel clicked by itself in a sharp staccato final message.

An incoming message.

The boy smiled. ‘Open fire!’ he shouted.

And all around him hell erupted.

The chanting of the cultists faltered. They looked up, distracted, angry, shocked. The first volley cut down almost a hundred. Then the ragged guerrillas followed the boy’s lead and charged forward across the broken plascrete of the landing field, firing as they came and yelling at the top of their voices.

The ring of cultists opened up, fraying under the shock of the assault. But there were many hundreds more of them further west by their drop pods. These now set up a cacophony of fury, and began running eastwards to meet the attack.

The boy went to one knee, picking his targets calmly, firing two or three rounds into each. The enemy formation had splintered – they were confused, scattered, but in their midst their champions were restoring discipline quickly, shooting the more panicked of their underlings, roaring at the rest to stand fast.

Now, the boy thought. It must be now.

In the sky above the spaceport, eye-blinding lights appeared, lancing even through the heavy smoke and the preternatural night. With them came a sullen, earth-trembling roar.

In an explosion of concrete and soil, a behemoth thundered to earth. It was dozens of metres tall, painted midnight blue, and on its multi-faceted sides was painted the sigil of the double-headed axe. It scattered the cultists through the air with the force of its impact, and in its wake came another, and another, and then two more. It was as if a series of great metal castles had suddenly been hurled to earth.

With a scream of straining metal, long hatches fell down from the sides of these monstrous apparitions, as though they were the petals opening on a flower. These hatches hit the ground and buried themselves in earth and shattered stone and the bodies of the screaming cultists, becoming ramps. And down the ramps came an army, a host of armour-clad warriors blazing a bloody path with the automatic fire of bolters, meltaguns, plasma rifles and rocket launchers. In their midst hulking Dreadnoughts strode, picking up the cultist champions in their clawed fists and tossing them away like discarded rags. They belched flame as they came, incinerating the cultists, boiling their flesh within their armour, making of them black desiccated statues.

And overhead the engines of destruction swooped down to unloose cargoes of bombs on the unholy stain which the Chaos minions had inflicted upon the tortured planet. As they went off, so in their brilliant light something bestial and immense could be seen twisting and thrashing in its last agonies. It sank down below the level of the plascrete launch pad as though below the surface of a lake, bellowing, and as the missiles rained down on it, so the blackened earth became solid again, and the stain became that of normal charred earth and stone, the desecration lifted before it could be consummated.

The boy stood with his bolt pistol forgotten in his hands, staring at that great storm of fire, a scene like the ending of a world. He felt the concussion of the shells beat at the air in his very lungs, and the heat of them crackled the hair on his head, but he stood oblivious. Tears shone in his eyes as he watched the obliteration of those who had destroyed his home, and in that moment there was only a single thought in his mind.

He stared at the massive, fearsome ranks of the advancing Space Marines, and thought: this is me – this is what I want to be.

Thus did the Dark Hunters Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes return to the planet of Perreken, to save a world, and to retrieve the remains of one of their own.

About the Author

Paul Kearney’s Warhammer 40,000 work comprises the short story ‘The Last Detail’, the Dark Hunters novel Umbra Sumus and the accompanying short story ‘The Blind King’. He studied at Lincoln College, Oxford and has been widely published, as well as being longlisted for the British Fantasy Award. He lives and works in Port Glenone, Northern Ireland.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2010, in the Legends of the Space Marines anthology.

This eBook edition published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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ISBN: 978-1-78251-339-1

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* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.