BRING THE NIGHT
Rob Sanders

 
They called it the Veiled Region for a reason. Dust-choked and bur¬ied in the Garon Nebula, the Hell Stars were a bloodshot haze, their dungeon glow the red of instruments heated for torture. What Demrid Sheremetev wouldn't give to see them now. Arx-Phineus IV was a miserable garrison world in a forgotten corner of the Segmentum Tempestus. It was a bleak world, mostly mica desert and crumbling fortifications that would hold more interest for an Imperial archeographer than an enemy. To the 1002nd Volscian Shadow Brigade it was home.
As Lord Marshal and Planetary Governor, Sheremetev was respon¬sible not only for his Guardsmen but also for the garrison-serving communities dotted across the small world. When a supply brig passed through a nearby meteor storm, the ship warned the gar¬rison world that it too was likely to encounter the phenomenon. With little to do but drink, gamble and fight - with the locals and each other - Sheremetev was eager to distract his men from the tedium of never-ending garrison duty. Seeking the sanction of his regimental commissar, the venerable Arturus Gannibal, the Lord Marshal proposed a skeleton watch and authorised a session of rest and recreation for the duration of the storm.
In doing so, Demrid Sheremetev granted his long-suffering Volscians and the people of this ugly little world something they could never have dreamed of finding in the murky skies: a night of beauty. As Arx-Phineus IV's brief day turned to night, the Lord Marshal ordered an extra ration of grog for his off-duty Guardsmen. Music from settlement drinking-holes was carried across the mica deserts on the wilderness breeze. Volscians came out onto the sands, crowd¬ing about Guard bastions and derelict fortifications. They sang the raucous songs of their hive world home with drink in their bellies and local girls in their arms. On the roof of the central command spire, among the vox-masts and gun emplacements, the Lord Mar¬shal and Arturus Gannibal shared a bottle of amasec Sheremetev had been saving and watched the show.
Eyes turned towards the heavens. The meteorite shower lit up the sky with its dazzling re-entries. The nebulous murk became a dance of light, flashing, streaming. Meteorites slashed down through the atmosphere, trailing blinding arcs of light. It was an incredible sight. The firmament glowed. It was the last beautiful thing any of them ever saw.

Somewhere a vox was bleeding static. It was all Sheremetev had heard for days: the brain-aching hiss of nothingness punctuated by begging, suffering and screaming, or sometimes by the whoosh of Volscian las-fire. A vox-bank on an open channel was receiving spo¬radic transmissions from forts, bastions and outposts from across the garrison world.
Beyond the stale stench of death and the fearful unfamiliarity of a world made stranger, Sheremetev only had the ear-bleeding insistence of the vox to help him visualise the horror of the planet's predicament. His garrison world. His responsibility. The night of the meteor shower had taken everything else. The world turned. The blazing re-entries died away with the festivities. As night turned to day, Sheremetev ordered the Volscian Shadow Brigade back to force readiness and a full complement for the early morning watch. Only then did he hit his bunk. He was awoken only two hours later by the officer of the watch, Lieutenant Krusak. He informed his superior that an epidemic of blindness had broken out amongst the garrison Guardsmen and the wider planetary population. Many had already lost their sight. For others it was deteriorating fast.
'Send for the chief medical officer and the regimental astropath,' Sheremetev had ordered. If the situation was as bad as it sounded then they might need to send for assistance.
'Exley's over-run in the infirmary. We've sent for the astropath,' Krusak had told him. 'But we can't find her.'
Sheremetev had sat on the side of his bunk. Gannibal and the Volscians were murky silhouettes. 'Keep looking. And turn on the lights,' the Lord Marshal had said.
'…they're on, sir,' Krusak had told him. Sheremetev nodded to himself in the growing darkness. He tapped on his temple.
'Not in here,' he had announced grimly.
That had been two weeks ago. Perhaps more.
'Arturus?' Sheremetev croaked across the command post.
'Lord Marshal,' the aged commissar replied finally. 'Still here.' It was difficult to tell where he was. The floor possibly. Sheremetev had found his way to a chair in front of a crackling runebank, the raw hiss of the vox in one ear and the meaningless chatter of a tech¬nomat servitor repeating what Sheremetev could only think was an endless and growing list of emergency imperatives in lingua-technis. 'Lieutenant?'
Nothing.
'Krusak?'
'I think the lieutenant's dead, sir.'
'Vanders?'
'Yes, Lord Marshal.'
'Sergeant, check in,' Sheremetev ordered.
'Yes, sir,' the gruff voice of the hive world sergeant returned. 'Ordell… Zandt… Nardina… Wozniak…'
The Lord Marshal heard all but Wozniak bleakly identify them¬selves from their positions on the blind perimeter. Thirst and hunger had hit them hard. Like the lieutenant, Wozniak too had left them.
Then, as the roll call was completed…
'Did you hear that?' Sheremetev said. The distant boom of engines closing. It built to a passing thunder, roaring thrusters taking craft down to the dusty plain to the east of the base, the landing zone that the garrison charitably called the spaceport.
'A lander?' Gannibal said weakly
'The Adeptus Astartes?' the sergeant suggested.
Sheremetev wanted to give the Volscian some hope.
'Viper Legion, out of Aurelius,' the Lord Marshal told them.
'Emperor be praised,' Guardsman Nardina gasped.
The Viper Legion occasionally honoured Arx-Phineus IV with visits as part of their own patrols and broader vigilance within the Garon Nebula.
'Sergeant,' Sheremetev announced, the dry rasp of his voice assum¬ing something of its usual confidence and determination. 'Protocols will be observed. Meet the Adeptus Astartes in the courtyard. Inform them that we are the victims of a rare astral phenomenon. Apprise them of the desperation of our situation. Take Zandt. Go, son. Emperor's speed.'
'Yes, Lord Marshal.' As with Sheremetev, something of the old Vols¬cian sergeant had returned. Sheremetev listened to Ordell pull aside the materials they had used to barricade the command post door and heard the two Guardsmen stumble and pat their way along the access corridor.
For the longest time Sheremetev, the commissar and the remaining Volscians listened. They waited for salvation.
It never came.
The light flutter of hope in the Lord Marshal's stomach turned to lead as he heard the sickening crash of a boltgun out on the landing zone. Tumbling through the absolute darkness inside his head, his heart snatched in sickening realisation, Sheremetev knew the sound of an execution round. It was closely followed by another.
'God-Emperor, no…' was all the Lord Marshal could manage.
'Secure the perimeter,' Commissar Gannibal ordered.
'What's happening?' Guardsman Nardina bleated fearfully.
'It's not the Viper Legion,' Gannibal told him. 'Nardina, Odell, get on the door.'
The wait was an eternity of screams. Not simple suffering. Not bru¬tality for survival's sake. Not the pain and suffering that had followed the garrison world's descent into darkness. It wasn't fear for what was to come. It was the heart-plunging horror of the here and now. Menace. Dread, fully realised. Torture. Terror. Death.
Across the open vox-channel, without the command centre and within, Guardsmen and the Imperial citizenry they were supposed to be protecting were at the mercy of an invasion force. Sheremetev had no choice but to wait and bear silent witness to the fearful ordeal while plate-clad monsters hunted his people with boltgun and blade through the private darkness of their doom. When it arrived in the command centre, the hydraulic inevitability of power-armoured steps carrying the Angels of Death right up to their door, the thun¬derclap of boltguns was almost a relief.
Nardina died without even getting his finger to his trigger. Ordell's lasgun sent a wild whoosh at their attackers but to no avail. Within moments the coppery sting of their messy deaths filled the chamber.
Silence. Step. Silence. Step. Sheremetev angled his head and lis¬tened for his end. When the voice came it was a booming everything, intimate yet everywhere - at one with the darkness in which the Lord Marshal was drowning.
'I have brought you the night, mortal…'
Sheremetev blinked his blindness and swallowed back his fear.
'My name is Demrid Sheremetev, Lord Marshal of the 1002nd Vols¬cian Shadow Brigade…'
'No, no, no,' the voice chided, the words chill like the desert night. 'We don't deal in names. Neither yours, nor our own. We are the night.'
'You are traitors…'
'We deal in dread and the end that follows,' the renegade angel told him. 'It is our calling.'
'The storm?' Sheremetev asked. 'It was yours?' He had to know.
'A weapon of terror,' the Chaos Space Marine told him. 'One of many at our disposal, Imperial pig. Now listen carefully.' The dark¬ness gave an order to one of its own. There was a scuffle. Sheremetev could hear Gannibal's feeble grunts of exertion against the Chaos Space Marines that held him. He reached out but flinched as the commissar's bolt pistol went off. The Lord Marshal heard his friend cry out as an armoured gauntlet crushed the bone in his hand around the pistol as well as the thunk of the pistol hitting the floor, where the owner of the silky voice kicked it away
'That's better,' the darkness said. 'Now we can talk. We have in our possession your soul-bound wretch of a regimental astro telepath. Know that she is but a possession to us. Without purpose, a piece of meat. I implore you, do not take away that purpose, for it is the only thing keeping her alive.'
'What do you want?'
'I want to answer your prayers,' the darkness promised. 'I want to send a request for assistance to the Viper Legion on Aurelius.'
'You want to lure the Emperor's angels here so that you can murder them,' Gannibal bawled at them, the aged commissar still struggling against his captors.
'The witch will help us in order to save her psyker skin,' the dark¬ness told Sheremetev, 'but for Aurelius to take us seriously, we need your regimental authorisation codes. The ones you are going to give me.'
'Don't give this monster anything,' Gannibal roared.
The darkness gave another order, an instruction that was only made complete by the hideous screaming of the commissar that followed.
'Do you hear that?' the darkness put to Sheremetev, coming in close. 'He lacked foresight and I'm taking his eyes. He wasn't going to need them. I'm here thinking about what else he might not need - and he will be but the first. I'll bring in your men one by one and take them apart before you. You'll hear their screams. You'll feel their blood spray against your face.'
Sheremetev was shaking his head. 'I beg you. Don't do this…'
'No, I beg you, do not take the selfish path.'
'I can't give you…'
'You can,' the darkness insisted. 'You can and you will. And here's why. Nobody's coming to help you, to save you, to avenge you. My vessel is positioned to destroy any vessel attempting to leave or enter the system. After deploying the atmospherics you took for a pretty storm, we sat in deep orbit for days just to listen to your tiny garrison world tear itself apart. The screams. The merciless degeneration of order into chaos, robbery and murder. Before we even set foot on this planet, we savoured it all. Do not doubt our commitment to your suffering. Do this and I promise you my mercy.'
'Demrid, no,' Gannibal moaned.
'You have to,' the darkness told him, so close the words seemed to proceed from his own broken mind.
'I have to…' Sheremetev finally agreed.
'The astrotelepathic authorisation code?'
'Four-two-seven,' the Lord Marshal told him miserably. 'Psi-Sigma-Epsilon-Delta.'
The voice was suddenly distant once more, the Chaos Space Marine in congress with his dark brethren.
'Ensure that she tells them that this miserable world belongs to the Night Lords,' the darkness seethed. 'And exaggerate reports of our number. I want the Viper Legion to send everything they have.' Then to another renegade angel, 'Have the Tenebrious hold low orbit and stand by to receive our Thunderhawks. Then set a course for Aurelius'
'Yes, my lord.'
For Sheremetev there were no words.
'We bring the night,' the darkness told him. 'We brought the night to your wretched world and while the Viper Legion mobilises their companies, rushing to the aid of your corpses, we will bring the ter¬ror of the night to the angels' home world.'
Sheremetev heard Gannibal moan.
'Mercy…'
The Night Lord chuckled darkly.
'Your people shall die of thirst,' the darkness told him. 'Of starva¬tion. Of each other. You, however, who have been of such use to our cause… How could I not grant you an angel's mercy?'
Sheremetev heard the clunk of the Night Lord's bolt pistol priming.
'What do you think I am, a monster?'