‘We have to start somewhere.’
‘I know. And, like I said, if you’re sure about this, then I’ll be with you. Just be sure.’
Kalliston looked back up at the vision in the realspace viewers. The planet had a deathly aura to it, one that would have been evident even to the most warp-blind of mortals. The gaps between the rivers of fire were a deep sable, like shafts opening out onto nothingness. Something vast and terrible had happened there, and the residues of it were still echoing.
‘I am sure, brother,’ he said, and his voice was firm. ‘We were preserved for a reason, and that gives us responsibilities. We’ll make planetfall on the night-side of the terminator.’
His dark eyes narrowed, scrutinising the close view of the planet’s hemisphere. It looked like he was trying to conjure up a vision of something long gone, something destroyed beyond recovery.
‘Less than six months since we were ordered to leave,’ he said, talking to himself now. ‘Throne, Prospero has changed.’
‘MENES KALLISTON, CAPTAIN, Fourth Fellowship, Thousand Sons.’
I remember that after a few moments, and the words come quickly to my parched lips. That is what one is meant to say, I believe – name, rank and serial number.
Perhaps I should resist saying more, though I feel strangely reluctant to stay silent. They may have injected loquazine into my bloodstream, but I doubt it. I see no reason not to talk for a while. After all, I have no idea why I’m here, or what’s going on, or how long I will be alive.
‘What are you doing on Prospero?’ he asks.
‘I could ask you the same thing.’
‘You could. And I could kill you.’
I think he wants to kill me. There’s something in the voice, some timbre of eagerness, that gives it away. He’s holding himself back. He’s a Space Marine, I guess. There’s very little else like that voice, rolling up from those enhanced lungs and that muscle-slabbed gullet and that great barrel-chest like water from a deep mill.
We are brothers then, of a sort.
‘What do you know of the destruction of this planet?’ he asks.
His voice hasn’t been raised yet. He speaks carefully, keeping the tide of violence in check. It would not take much to break that dam.
‘We were ordered to leave orbit six months ago,’ I say. The truth seems the best policy, at least for now. ‘Some questioned it, but I did not. I never doubted the orders of my primarch. It was only later, when we could not make contact, that we realised something was wrong.’
‘How much later?’
‘Weeks. We’d been in the warp.’
‘Why did you not come back at once?’
Ah, yes. I have asked myself that many times. As the questions come, I remember more of myself. I still cannot recall what led me to this place, though. The blank is complete, like a steel mask over the past. There is an art to making such a mask, and it is not easy to master. I realise the calibre of those who have me captive.
‘I wanted to. Others did not. We made enquiries through astropaths, but our battle-codes were rejected whenever we made contact. Soon after that, our ships were attacked. By you, I presume, or those in league with you.’
Does my guess hit home? Am I nearing the truth? My interrogator gives no sign. He gives nothing away but the smell of blood and the hot, repeated breathing in the dark.
‘Did many of you survive?’
‘I don’t know. Dispersal was the only option.’
‘So your ship came here alone.’
‘Yes.’
Should I be more evasive? I really don’t know. I have no strategy, no objective. None of the information I give him seems important. Perhaps it would do, if I could remember more of the circumstances of my capture.
My mind-sight remains dark. To be confined to the five senses of my birth has become crippling. I realise then that the withdrawal will only get worse. I don’t know whether it’s permanent, or some feature of the chamber I’m in, or a temporary injury. As an Athanaean, I have become used to picking up the mental images of others shimmering beyond their faces, like a candle flickering behind a cotton sheet.
I’m handling its removal badly. It’s making me want to talk, to find some way of filling the gap. And, in any case, I don’t need psychic senses to detect the extremity of my interrogator. He’s cradling some enormous capacity for rage, for physical violence, and it’s barely in check. This is either something I can use, or it places me in terrible danger.
‘Even so, it took you a long time to come back,’ he remarks.
‘Warp storms held us. They were impenetrable for months.’
My interrogator laughs then, a horrifying sound like throat-cords being pulled apart.
‘They were. Surely you know what caused them.’
I sense him leaning forwards. I can see nothing, but the breathing comes closer. I have a mental image of a long, tooth-filled mouth, with a black tongue lolling out, and have no idea how accurate it is.
‘You were either blessed, or cursed, that you made it through,’ he says, and I feel the joy he takes in the control of my fate. ‘I have yet to determine which it will be, but we will come to that soon.’
THERE WERE NO Stormbirds left in the hold, and the Geometrichad never carried Thunderhawks, so the descent had to be in a bulk lander. The destroyer’s crew had been whittled down to a bare skeleton – a couple of hundred mortals, some still in Spireguard livery. In times past they would have looked up at their Legiones Astartes masters in awe as they worked to prepare the lander, but the events of the last few months had shaken that hold. They had seen the ruin of Prospero for themselves, and it had crushed what spirit remained in them.
Many, perhaps, had had family still on the planet when destruction came. Those connections, Kalliston knew, were important to mortals. He himself couldn’t remember what it was like to find such things significant, but he felt the loss in other ways.
After launch, the lander fell through the thickening atmosphere clumsily, responding to the pilot’s controls like an over-enthusiastic steed. The control column had been designed for smaller hands than a Space Marine’s, and the atmosphere was still clogged with clouds of ash, blown across the charred terrain below by the angry remnants of continent-wide storms.
The lander made planetfall hard, jarring the crew against their restraint-cages as the retro-burners struggled against the inertia of the plummet. None of the squad members spoke. The cages slammed up, freeing them to take up their weapons. Kalliston, Arvida and the other battle-brothers in the load-bay mag-locked bolters and power-blades smoothly before the rear doors wheezed open.
The air of Prospero sighed into the load-bay. Kalliston could taste the afterglow of the furnace through his helm’s rebreather. The atmosphere was still warm, still bitter with floating motes of ruin.
Night had fallen. The sky was the dark red of an old scab, broken with patches of messy shadow where the smog-clouds raced. Ruined buildings broke the horizon in all directions, skeletons of libraries and treasure houses, armouries and research stations. There was no sound save the winding-down of the lander’s twin engines and the enervated brush of the hot wind.
Kalliston walked down the ramp first. His boot crunched as he came off the end of it. He looked down. The earth of Prospero glistened. A carpet of glass fragments lay there, as deep and smooth as a dusting of snow.
Everything was glass, once. The pyramids, the libraries, the galleries. Now, it is our dust.
‘Sweep pattern,’ he ordered over the vox. ‘Ranged weapons. Rendezvous point Aleph.’
The remaining Space Marines spread out slowly from the embarkation point. The two who’d piloted the ship during the descent remained to guard it, stationed at the end of the ramp under the shelter of the rear fuselage. The seven others lowered bolters and walked as stealthily as they could across the glittering glass-dust. They organised themselves into a rough semi-circle, each brother heading for a different point in the line of buildings ahead. They stayed within a hundred metres of one another, opening out into a wide net. Steadily, they began to sweep though the devastated streets ahead.