Ghost legion, p.4
Ghost Legion, page 4
‘And that is what bothers me,’ Kyrin said. ‘We’re the Alpha Legion – we’ve always been fluid, adapting our goals to the available possibilities. But now you have your heart set on becoming a new Emperor.’
‘I am no Emperor!’ Solomon retorted sharply.
‘You told Asid that this was your empire,’ Kyrin pointed out.
Solomon waved a hand irritably. ‘A figure of speech, intended to give him the impression of unity, and let him know that he cannot sate his violent desires on any corner of the New Alliance without consequence.’
‘Hah!’ Kyrin snorted. ‘That would make a change.’
Solomon frowned. ‘What is your meaning?’
‘As your castellan, I am familiar with the methodology of the warbands that you subsumed into the Ghost Legion,’ Kyrin said dryly. ‘None flout your decrees openly, but the New Alliance is far from the utopia you seem to envisage.’
Ceramite scraped against metal as cold fury involuntarily tightened Solomon’s fingers on the haft of the Pale Spear. ‘I need details.’
‘Details?’ Kyrin echoed. ‘It’s exactly as you would expect. They hate the Imperium, and do not view your “empire” as anything more than occupied Imperial territory, to be exploited for their own desires.’ He shook his head. ‘I cannot prove that the sudden viral outbreak on a particular moon was the Sons of Venom testing their latest weapon, but it’s by far the most likely explanation. I cannot prove that a colony of asteroid miners found flayed alive was the work of the Penitent Sons rather than aeldari pirates that slipped through our cordons, but given what I’ve witnessed of their actions against our foes…’ He shook his head. ‘Those ones. I do not even begin to understand their mentality.’
‘They wound themselves as penance for our Legion turning against the Emperor, and all the atrocities they have committed since,’ Solomon said. Kyrin stared at him uncomprehendingly.
‘Then why do they not stop committing these so-called atrocities?’ he demanded.
‘I presume because then they would have nothing to punish themselves for,’ Solomon said wearily. ‘The Penitent Sons are… difficult. They seem to want to be reprimanded, especially in front of others. It appears almost pathological. They are astonishingly efficient at being just inefficient enough to require chastisement.’ He sighed. ‘I have dealt with them so far by refusing to praise or berate them, but this is a new development. If they seek punishment, then the only penalty that will not be taken as a reward is execution. Even that cannot be a spectacle, to be used as an example to others.’
‘And the Sons of Venom?’ Kyrin asked.
‘They must take the same.’ Solomon ground the butt of the Pale Spear into the rock beneath his feet in frustration. ‘Why can they not see? They undermine every part of this work! How can we bring down the Imperium if I have to protect our own domain from our own troops? Are there any other infractions of which I should be aware?’
Kyrin hesitated.
‘I appointed you as my castellan because I trust you,’ Solomon said. ‘Whatever your opinion of that role, do not make me regret my choice.’
‘People have been going missing,’ Kyrin said heavily. ‘Only a few. The bodies of some have been found, although they were extremely difficult to identify.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Extensive genetic modifications had been conducted on them. As though they had been tested to the point of destruction.’
Solomon nodded. ‘Yallamagasa may be able to assist.’
Kyrin stared at him. ‘Solomon. Who do you think is the most likely culprit?’
Solomon stared back for a second, running through the ramifications of what Kyrin was saying. Kazadin Yallamagasa, the Biologis Diabolicus cast out of the Martian priesthood millennia ago for his theories and experiments, had assisted the Alpha Legion of the Ultima Segmentum for centuries. Few legionnaires of the Ghost Legion had not been raised up from their mortal human origins by Yallamagasa’s chilly, brutal expertise; he implanted the organs and initiated the gene-sequencing that had turned Solomon and Kyrin into what they were today. He assisted the Legion in matters of flesh and blood, in exchange for captives and raw materials.
If he had decided to start harvesting some of those things himself, from the readily accessible source all around him…
Yallamagasa was not Alpha Legion. He was a valued partner from the New Mechanicum, one who would not accept that Solomon had any authority to chastise him for his transgressions. It would be possible to kill him – costly, but possible – but that would bring with it two new problems. Firstly, although they were hardly monolithic, the New Mechanicum were unlikely to take kindly to such an occurrence. Secondly, without the Biologis Diabolicus’ expertise, the already fraught process of creating new legionnaires would become much more difficult.
‘You see why I asked for you to return?’ Kyrin said softly. ‘The attacks are an inconvenience, but they served as a pretence. I needed to make you aware of how your commanders are undermining your empire, and I could not trust any communication.’
The attacks. There, at least, was a problem where the solution was, if not obvious, at least not yet obviously complicated.
‘Let us discuss them, since that was your pretence,’ Solomon said. The issues of Yallamagasa and the other commanders required further thought before he acted. ‘The insurgents. The governor claims she can read nothing into their activities. What say you?’
Kyrin’s troubled expression smoothed; this was intelligence analysis, as second nature to him as breathing. ‘I suspect the Mechanicus.’
Solomon raised his eyebrows. ‘You do? Why?’ The Adeptus Mechanicus had a small presence here, with one notable, medium-sized forge, as might be expected on a planet like Sertra which had prominent industrial and technological aspects.
‘The attacks appear to be at random, but they are almost too random,’ Kyrin said. ‘They feel designed to avoid any conclusions being drawn from their methodology or location. It’s as though a machine is deliberately seeking to avoid a pattern.’
‘And in doing so, has left one anyway,’ Solomon mused. ‘Have any attacks targeted Mechanicus assets? They are loath to destroy their own machines.’
‘There was one,’ Kyrin said, nodding. ‘An older facility with limited output, although that was not immediately obvious.’
‘A possible smokescreen,’ Solomon said. ‘Very well. Perhaps we need to have a conversation with their leaders and explain to them how restrained we have been by allowing them continued use of their own forges.’ He paused, as a possibility occurred to him. Blood money was an old concept, but not without its uses, if one needed to pacify a group in the aftermath of an inconvenient death of one of its members. ‘And also, how grateful our friends in the New Mechanicum would be if we allowed them to–’
He broke off as his vox began hissing static. An echoing sibilance from Kyrin’s answered the immediate question of whether the fault was isolated to Solomon’s equipment. He turned to face the distant elevator, then paused. It was best not to rely on your own assumptions when you were with someone more familiar with the terrain.
‘Are these caverns accessible from anywhere other than the palace?’ he asked.
‘The official answer is “no”, since they were intended for the private use of the governor and their family,’ Kyrin replied, raising his bolter. He aimed it into the shadows deeper in the cave system. ‘I suspect that may no longer be correct.’
-190.14.21
Solomon’s first instinct was to withdraw towards the palace, but centuries of the Alpha Legion’s method of warfare had instilled in him a wariness of the obvious. The elevator was some distance away, and no immediate threat had yet presented itself. He would not flee from a vox disruption only to then be caught by a rockfall triggered by timed explosives, or a bomb planted in the elevator itself. He donned his helmet and unclamped his bolter instead – a relic weapon taken from a dead Silver Templar – and readied the Pale Spear in his other hand. The accuracy of a bolter would normally suffer if fired one-handed, but Solomon trusted in his bionic arm; a minor daemon was bound into the metal, allowing it greater strength and speed than would otherwise be the norm, as well as the ability to alter its shape on his whims, and even react to threats before he had consciously registered them.
‘Who knew we were down here?’ he asked, covering the approach from the elevator while his battle-brother did the same with the garden’s deeper caverns. He blinked at his helmet display, which flickered uncertainly.
‘Knew? Probably fairly few,’ Kyrin replied, his voice rendered choppy and distorted through the audio receptors of Solomon’s armour. ‘But your arrival is no secret, and the crystal gardens were historically where the governor entertained important guests. However, if attackers are approaching through the caverns, they may not know we’re here at all. They may simply be intending to gain access to the palace from below.’
‘A valid point,’ Solomon conceded. He growled in frustration, and removed his helmet again; whatever was disrupting their vox was affecting his armour’s sensors as well, and he would rather leave his head exposed than be unable to see or hear an enemy’s approach. ‘We should fall back to–’
A clatter of rocks was his only warning before long-limbed shapes swarmed out of the dark caverns, the hiss of Solomon’s vox rising to a tortured squeal as they closed. For a moment Solomon thought they were warrior clades of the tyranid hive fleets, but then he caught the scrape of metal on stone, and the faintest glint of light reflecting off soot-blackened mechanical prosthetics. His own bionic arm twitched upwards, and he and Kyrin opened fire at the same time.
Mass-reactive bolt-rounds ignited and filled the cavern with harsh, actinic light as the self-propelled shells slammed into their targets: the skirmishers of the Adeptus Mechanicus, optimised for fast movement, stealth, and endurance, with what little remained of their original organic bodies hidden beneath plates of armour. Two of the swarming enemy fell, one with its chest cracked open, and the other emitting an electronic squeal of rage as the knee joint of one of the backward-bent legs on which it now moved was blown out. Their advantage of surprise gone, the attackers opened fire, but although Solomon was shaken by the impacts of the heavy-calibre stub weapons, his armour was equal to its task. The infiltrators closed in on him, seeking to overwhelm him with shimmering powerblades and crackling taser goads.
This was their mistake.
Solomon clamped his bolter to his thigh again and swept the Pale Spear in a wide, double-handed arc. The twin blades sliced through metal and flesh with equal ease, and three of the enemy fell with their torsos carved near in half by the strange weapon’s unnatural edge. Solomon batted away the strike of a taser goad with the haft, then lunged one-handed to impale one foe while his arm reshaped itself into a blade of its own, which severed the jointed metal neck of the Mechanicus warrior whose strike he had just parried. He ripped the Pale Spear’s blades out of his impaled victim and turned the move into a spin that ended with him crushing its mechanical skull with the spear’s butt end. It toppled backwards with a blurt of machine code, and did not move again.
If the Pale Spear was not truly the long-lost weapon of the primarch, it was nevertheless possessed of a power unlike anything else Solomon had seen, and capable of inflicting devastating wounds. Neither armour nor flesh could stand before it; he cut down two more of the enemy with sharp, measured jabs and cuts that would have simply sent them stumbling backwards had their insectoid carapace not given way before the spear’s blades as though Solomon were sweeping away cobwebs. His bionic arm shifted into barbed tendrils and wrapped itself around a taser goad swung at his head. The infiltrator unleashed its weapon’s charge, but the daemon in Solomon’s arm drank the Motive Force down, and he drove the Pale Spear into his attacker’s skull from underneath, then threw its body at two more. One twisted aside from the slack-limbed missile and fired its stub carbine at Solomon’s head, but his arm had already morphed his hand into a convex plate that blocked the round, and then the Pale Spear took his enemy in what remained of its throat. The last one of the group fought its way out from under its dead comrade, only for Solomon to drive one blade down into its chest plating. It died with a squeal, pinned against the rock like an iridescent insect in the collection of an entomologist.
‘I concur,’ Kyrin Gadraen said breathlessly. ‘We should fall back.’ He had defended himself with a pair of power knives, but a gash in his chestplate showed where one of his enemy’s weapons had beaten his guard, and he limped on his left leg as he made his way through the bodies towards Solomon; perhaps the artificial joint had been overloaded by a shock from a taser goad.
Solomon checked his vox, but the distortion was gone. ‘Tulava,’ he broadcast. ‘Are you there? Has there been any attack on the palace?’
No reply. Solomon gritted his teeth. ‘Tulava?’
‘Sorry, had my mouth full – they’ve got some great food up here. No, all quiet. Why?’
Solomon let out a breath of equal parts relief and frustration. ‘Because Kyrin and I have just been attacked in the crystal gardens.’
The vox emitted a crash, as of a tray clattering to the floor. ‘What? Are you injured?’
‘I am unhurt, Kyrin has taken some minor wounds,’ Solomon reported.
‘I’ll be right there.’
Solomon opened his mouth to protest that it was unnecessary, then closed it again. There were some battles he knew it was pointless to begin fighting. A couple of moments later, a twisted column of purple-tinged darkness welled up from the floor, and cleared to reveal Tulava Dyne. She held her force staff ready and crackling with arcane energy, and her hair was streaming out from her head in the grip of the invisible, intangible gale of power with which she had surrounded herself. In contrast to the slightly scruffy, irreverent image she usually adopted, this was Tulava Dyne the former primaris psyker, and sorceress of Chaos – a being capable of bringing the galaxy’s most fundamental forces to bear on her foes.
‘It is over,’ Solomon said calmly. He gestured to the bodies on the floor. ‘They are all dead.’
Tulava ignored him, and stretched one hand out with her eyes closed. It was only after a few more seconds that she grounded her staff and let the gathered power ebb from her body. When she opened her eyes again they no longer glowed with energy, and her face shifted back into her usual half-amused expression, rather than one of teeth-clenching fury.
‘You appear to be correct,’ she said. ‘I can’t sense anything or anyone else out there.’ She prodded one of Solomon’s victims with her staff. ‘How did they sneak up on you, anyway?’
‘They were emitting some sort of wide-band static,’ Solomon told her. ‘It disrupted our voxes, but also our sensory equipment. They would have been near undetectable by our armour.’
Tulava sucked her teeth. ‘A good thing you two are so lethal. So, do we think we’ve found our insurrectionists?’
Solomon looked at Kyrin. ‘The evidence was apparently already pointing at the Adeptus Mechanicus. With this attack as well…’
‘But look at this,’ Kyrin said, kneeling down with a grunt of pain and pointing at one of their attackers. ‘The insignia on the armour has been gouged away.’
Solomon inspected it, then checked the others. It quickly became apparent that where the forgemark had not been destroyed by whatever weapon had killed the wearer, it had already been removed in some violent fashion.
‘Right,’ Tulava said, wiping her hand over her face in thought. ‘So are we looking at plausible deniability, or a genuine rogue faction that’s disavowed their former leaders for colluding with the New Alliance?’
‘Does it matter?’ Kyrin asked. ‘This cannot go unanswered. The Mechanicus enclaves must pay!’
Solomon shook his head. Now the adrenaline of the fight had worn off, he too wanted nothing more than to exact immediate and bloody revenge on whoever had sent these warriors, no matter whether or not he and Kyrin had been their intended targets. However, emotional recklessness was no substitute for long-term strategy.
‘Summary execution without proof is the hallmark of the Imperium, not the New Alliance,’ he said. ‘Besides which, even a selective culling of their leadership would impact productivity, which I would prefer to avoid unless necessary. We must determine the truth of the matter. I will speak to the Mechanicus’ highest-ranking adept.’
‘You’re going to visit their forges?’ Kyrin said, incredulous. ‘After this?’
‘Not alone,’ Solomon assured him. ‘That would be foolish. Assemble a robust honour guard, and inform Admiral Va’kai that he is to have the Unseen in position to deliver orbital bombardment if necessary. I want these wretches to feel my blade hovering above their necks, and see if they betray themselves.’
‘That’s unlikely,’ Tulava said. ‘Even Imperial cogboys aren’t exactly demonstrative, unless they’re getting angry about how you’ve disrespected a machine spirit. Besides, they’re experts in telling you to take a walk into a fusion reactor, but hiding it behind jargon and pretending they don’t understand how normal people communicate.’ She met both of their level stares in turn, and huffed. ‘What?’
Solomon smiled to himself. ‘I think it is fair to say that none of us here would be counted amongst the ranks of normal people.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Tulava grumbled, leaning on her staff. ‘I’m still more normal than them.’
‘Tulava’s right,’ Kyrin said. ‘How will you detect lies from the Mechanicus?’
‘We will take a being capable of decoding their mannerisms,’ Solomon said calmly. ‘Is the Diabolicus Secundus still present on Sertra?’
‘Please say no,’ Tulava put in before Kyrin could answer. He glanced at her, but nodded.
‘Yes.’
