Lucius: The Faultless Blade Read online

A deck officer made for Clarion’s throne carrying a data-slate containing the results of the latest augur surveys for her attention. He passed by Lucius, giving him a wide berth and keeping his gaze averted in deference. Lucius plucked the slate from his hands.

  ‘I’ll be taking that.’

  The crewman froze. He bowed his head immediately, his eyes fixing on the deck. ‘By your will, my lord.’

  The man whimpered as Lucius caught his face in one clawed hand. He fought to stop the tremors shaking his body as he was forced to lock eyes with the Eternal. He failed.

  ‘Yes,’ Lucius said, staring down at the serf with a wicked smile, ‘I am your lord.’

  ‘What about…’ Clarion tried her most innocent smile. ‘Just one?’

  Lucius released the man, who promptly scurried back into the crew pits. The Eternal was silent for a moment, his eyes scanning over the slate, before he set it atop the head of a passing servitor. The nerveless thrall shuffled along oblivious, the device teetering from its skull to clatter to the floor when it rounded a corner.

  ‘They won’t miss one,’ Clarion pressed.

  A tic twitched a scar upon Lucius’ upper lip, making it appear like a snapping whip of glossy red. His bloodshot eyes flicked down at Clarion.

  ‘Just one?’

  Clarion nodded eagerly. ‘Just one.’

  Lucius looked back to the oculus viewscreen that dominated the entire forward wall of the bridge for a moment, before turning and staring back into the shadows.

  ‘Just one.’

  Captain Arvel Donata could not see anything through the flames that were rapidly consuming the bridge of the Bolt of Corsa. A falling buttress had cut a gash in his scalp clear to the bone of his skull, as well as crushing three of his crew to death. The only ones who had remained faithfully at their stations were the servitors who were unable to leave them. They waved useless charred appendages at the shattered consoles they were hardwired into, whatever flesh that was left to them running from their bones and bionics like dirty tallow.

  ‘Status report,’ he roared into the conflagration. ‘Somebody tell me something!’

  There was no one alive to answer him. Fifteen thousand men and women filled the decks of the Bolt of Corsa, and their captain would go to his death without any understanding of how it had been brought about.

  Everything had gone according to plan at first. After the second volley of torpedoes had left the destroyer’s prow firing tubes, Arvel had signalled the remainder of the fleet to provide an update on the engagement. Their target, whatever it was, had yet to move since first appearing on their scopes. Had it been a renegade frigate or pirate vessel, or a warship of the true Archenemy, it would have broken in the face of six Imperial ship killers and sought to flee to the darkest black. Instead, this target had remained inert, and disappointment cooled Arvel’s vigour. Another hulk of wreckage, or a spar of frozen rock. Nothing more.

  His disappointment had quickly proven groundless, however. A breathless gunnery officer had rushed to his command throne, reporting that not even a single one of their first spread of torpedoes had made impact upon the target. Arvel had been poised to reprimand the young man for failing to exercise control over his humours, when the vox-officer patched him through to inbound transmissions from the other ships of the squadron.

  The communications were choppy, flawed by signal corruption and mired in static, but the point of each message was clear. None of their torpedoes had struck.

  That was the last transmission received by the Bolt of Corsa before all vox and auspex went down. Interference and scrapcode surged through the communications and sensor suites of the Cobra, robbing the ship of her eyes, her ears and her tongue.

  But not her teeth.

  ‘I want a third spread ready to fire inside of four minutes,’ ordered Arvel. ‘Get the macro-cannon online and primed, and get my communications restored with fleet command and the rest of the squadron. I don’t care if you have to stand outside and wave signal flags, just do it.’

  The crew scrambled to execute his commands. Anxious minutes passed as teams coordinated and shouted to one another. Tech-priests and enginseers pried open consoles and control stations, the latter digging into the machines’ innards to try and re-establish auspex and vox-connections, while the former wailed and begged the machine-spirits for their forgiveness as they chanted entreaties and applied sacred unguents to their housings.

  A glut of sparks burst from a tower of auspex focusing coils, and the officer overseeing the station gave a shout of success. ‘We have auspex!’ Triumph creased the older man’s features as his hands ran over the console’s runeboards, refreshing the tactical readouts that poured out in lines of tiny green text.

  His face froze in shock, descending into horror. ‘Oh Throne,’ he whispered. ‘Throne of Terra, no.’

  The officer turned his panic-maddened eyes to Arvel, screaming just as a blinding light filled the forward portal.

  ‘Incoming!’

  The lances struck perfectly. The Bolt of Corsa’s void shields initially caught the crackling energy spears in a corona of liquid multicolour. They then caught fire, and overloaded in seconds. The beams carried on, slicing into the void-hardened flesh of the Cobra. Internal detonations rocked the deck, throwing crew to the ground and dashing them against their stations. Blood splashed against the metal, reflecting the light of fires as they ignited across the bridge.

  In the space of a minute, Arvel Donata’s world had been torn asunder. A buttress stanchion snapped overhead, driving him and several of his crew to the ground beneath its crushing weight. The commander rose on shaky legs, blood streaming down his face as flames swallowed his first command.

  His first, he realised with bitter finality, and only command.

  Captain Arvel Donata of Battlefleet Cadia staggered over to the brass railing before the charred command throne of the Bolt of Corsa. The railing was gone, liquefied into a molten soup by the fires. Breath sawed from his lungs, wet and hot from filling with smoke and internal bleeding. Arvel looked up, peering with stinging eyes through the smoke and flames towards the armourglass viewing blocks at the end of the bridge.

  The conflagration cleared for a moment. Just long enough for him to glimpse the sight of a massive bladed prow forged of bleached mauve and pearlescent silver in the instant before it struck his ship.

  Clarion giggled sweetly as the Diadem speared through the Imperial destroyer. It was a sound defined by innocence, completely at odds with the thousands of lives she ended in the span of a heart’s ­single beat.

  The smaller vessel, already savaged by the strike cruiser’s lances, came apart into hunks of spinning metal in an expanding cloud around the warship of the Cohors Nasicae. The other five vessels fired their manoeuvring thrusters, fighting desperately to escape the storm of wreckage hurtling towards them. Only a few were successful. By the time the Diadem passed them by, fully half of the squadron was destroyed, and the surviving ships were left drifting crippled in the void as their engines were boiled to slag by surgical volleys of precision lance fire.

  The deck heaved as a particularly large piece of wreckage crashed against the Diadem’s hull. Clarion smiled. That had been the ship’s bridge.

  The main bulkhead behind her throne ground open. Lucius stalked onto the bridge, his hooves pounding into the deck. He rounded on his shipmistress.

  ‘That,’ he snarled with an accusing claw, ‘was more than one.’

  Clarion tittered. ‘I can’t help it if the other ships were too daft to avoid their friend’s corpse.’ She waved at him for calm. ‘Just a little harmless fun.’

  ‘Auspex lock,’ droned a servitor from the sensorium pit. Clarion craned her body forwards. ‘Dictator-class.’

  ‘This was reckless,’ hissed Lucius.

  Clarion made to gesture for the Space Marine to relax, before she realised the s
ervitor had not stopped reporting.

  ‘Auspex lock, Dauntless-class. Auspex lock, Gothic-class. Auspex lock, Firestorm-class. Auspex lock, Overlord-class. Auspex lock, Victory-class.’

  The last one stole any other thought from Clarion’s mind. They were being targeted by a Victory-class battleship, the jewel in the crown of any battlefleet. That was bad. That was very, very bad.

  ‘Get us out of here!’ Bloody spittle flecked from Lucius’ maw as he watched the tactical hololiths fill with Imperial warships. The vindication of Cadia was coming, and swiftly.

  Clarion stood up on her throne, calling out orders to the crew. Her voice, tiny and sweet as it was, cut through the chaos, delivered with an authority that spoke more of her true, ageless self than the shell of meat and bone she dwelt within. Uniformed crew hurried from station to station. Reports filled the air, calling out inbound ordnance fire from the battleships of the Gate.

  The deck heaved as a barrage of fire smashed against the Diadem’s shields. Men and women tumbled to the deck, recovering and clinging to sparking console stations. Clarion did not so much as budge from her place, calm at the centre of the storm. She scowled as another volley struck her port flank, drawing the shields down further.

  ‘All power to engines and shields – we are running!’

  Direnc stopped when he saw the look in her eyes. He drew back from the kiss, feeling a cold wind drag its talons over the lush meadow valley. A tremor rocked the ground, filling the air with the sound of echoing thunder. His eyes were drawn to the hill, its soft rolling shape pulling into a needle’s point of barren red rock. The grass around him dried and decayed to ash, dropping him onto a bowl of cracked desert hardpan.

  Frantic, Direnc looked down. The maiden had vanished. Pain lit up his mind with acidic claws, flaring with sharp heat from his left hand. The fingers throbbed, feeling as though the muscles were straining against the flesh hard enough to snap the bones.

  Another tremor tore out over the ground, changing its complexion once again. All light ceased, leaving Direnc in utter darkness. He found he could no longer move his limbs, and the air filled with the sour reek of counterseptic and old blood. A deep thrum rattled his skin into gooseflesh, a noise and sensation he had known for as long as he could remember.

  He was on a ship.

  Direnc opened his eyes, truly opened them. Alchemical trails streaked his vision with dancing after-images. He saw the glaring light of glow-globes, hanging from dense chains that reached up into the shadows above.

  The chains rattled harshly as the chamber bucked again, hurling Direnc against his restraints, and a vice-like claw closed tight around his head. A strangled groan of metal reverberated through the air. He knew that sound. The ship was taking weapons fire. Another blast rocked the ship. An intense migraine burst in Direnc’s skull, so hard that he cried out.

  His vision cleared into focus enough to make out the enormous figure at the other end of the chamber. It was the demigod who had captured him aboard the daemon world. His pearl armour buzzed and snarled as he worked, crouched over an emaciated man locked into the same bondage as Direnc.

  The top of the man’s crown was cut open, the flesh pinned back and skull cut away to reveal the glistening red lump of his brain. The demigod loomed over it, sinking into the pulsing mass of flesh with savage implements and narrow silver probes.

  The man was laughing. Strings of thick drool spun from his desiccated lips as he doubled over with ecstatic joy. The demigod adjusted the probes slightly. The man’s laughter ceased, his head sinking as sobs of absolute despair racked his bony spine. Tears streamed down his consumptive cheeks, dripping from toothless lips as he moaned in utter, fathomless sadness.

  Direnc could not tear his horrified gaze from the man, until another flash of pain burst from his wrist. He looked down, only to find something infinitely more horrible.

  His hand had not been restored as it appeared in the garden. Yet something had indeed taken its place. A writhing cluster of glistening tentacles sprouted from his wrist, slapping and coiling against the arm of his restraint harness. Each was studded with hardened warts and sucking lamprey mouths filled with rings of translucent teeth.

  Nausea and shock warred at the pit of Direnc’s stomach. He vomited a thin stream of bile onto himself. He thrashed against his restraints, desperate to flee from a mutation he was too panic-stricken to remember was attached to him.

  The slave looked up, and froze. The demigod’s snarling helm was staring directly at him. Crystal-blue eye lenses flashed as they studied Direnc. The immense legionary rose in a waspish purr of armour servos, leaving the frail man to blubber and sob in his chains.

  Pounding footsteps echoed from the chamber as the Space Marine approached. He reared up, towering over Direnc. After a moment, he reached to disconnect the collar seals of his helm with a serpent’s hiss of equalising air pressure.

  A pale face looked down at Direnc as the Space Marine pulled his helmet free. It was somehow even more cold and inhuman than the ceramite mask had been. Eyes of amber shone in the dark, a predator’s eyes, dissecting the bound slave like any other laboratory specimen. Direnc felt his meaning melt away to nothing beneath that gaze.

  The demigod looked past Direnc, giving a short nod. Awkward, shuffling steps sounded from behind him, dragging booted and iron-shod feet to his back.

  ‘This one has outlived its usefulness to me,’ said the demigod in his inhumanly deep voice. Direnc felt clumsy hands of grey flesh and crude iron release him from his restraints. He cried out as the vice claw was pried from his head, tearing free jagged interface spikes from his temples.

  The Space Marine leaned down, drawing close with frightening intimacy to the slave, as he whispered, ‘It would have been better for you, if you had remained asleep.’

  The demigod turned back to his work, calling out over his shoulder before replacing his helm.

  ‘Take him to the tower.’

  Direnc looked up as his body was hauled free of his chains. A dead man bore him in his arms, his face slack, his body comprised more of black iron and wheezing cogwork than corpse flesh. Direnc’s feet slid numbly upon the deck as the servitor dragged him through the chamber. His eyes caught the wan impression of rows of amniotic tanks lining the walls. Foetal forms filled their sloshing insides, connected to horrid machines that pumped and harvested pale fluids from their bodies and brains, feeding them into containers of vivid, rose-coloured liquid.

  The slave’s eyes settled over one of the tanks, just before the servitor pulled him from the chamber. The bony husk of a woman floated limply in a wash of chemicals, her limbs curled to her body in uselessness. Her eyes were half open, their once vibrant colour drained away by the machines along with the rest of her as they stared into nothing.

  They were green.

  II.V

  The Diadem ripped free of the warp with a prismatic birthing cry of shorn reality. For all the wonders of technology deployed by mankind in the age when the Emperor reconquered the galaxy, emerging from the Sea of Souls aboard the vessels that sailed the void in His name had always been an act of great violence. The passage of ten millennia had done nothing to change that, and the ships of the nine fallen Legions were no exception.

  The strike cruiser’s hull bore new scars, earned in her flight from the Cadian Gate. Though the temperament of her shipmaster was often a cause for vexation on the part of Lucius the Eternal, the warlord could never doubt her skill. The daemon child had weaved his vessel through the hellish firestorm of the Imperium’s rage, one that would easily have been a match for an entire armada of warships, and survived to reach their destination.

  The ship that hung inert in the void waiting for them waited alone. Like the Diadem, which dwarfed its slight, angular frame, she had taken part in the defining moments that had forged the Imperium of Mankind, as well as those during the attempts to destroy it. She had
sailed the stars under a number of names and, even in the stunted lexicon of the Legions, not a single one of them had been pleasant. Whatever the appellation her current masters had chosen to have chiselled into her iron skin, the sour, base intelligence that lurked within the warship’s heart went about its existence changelessly. She was a cold, bladed thing, ever eager to inflict torment and malice.

  Lucius did not know what the ship’s name was. It was, or at least appeared to be, a thing born of human shipyards. Its silhouette did not match any known STC design, looking more like the stinger of some enormous insect than a spacecraft. When its transponder registration was analysed, the servitor slaved to the console provided nothing but a wash of chattering gibberish. As the ships drew closer, Lucius found he could not bring himself to care.

  It meant nothing to Lucius what the waiting vessel was called. All he was concerned about was the soul who commanded it.

  Guarded hails stitched out between the two ships, alone in the emptiness. Such meetings, even those of warriors who had once been Legion kin, were tense, tenuous affairs. Betrayal and bitter rivalries were rife amongst the lost and the damned, and the prospect of lingering any length of time within the realm of Imperial space placed each crew under mounting strain, as they stood poised to fight or fly the instant their scryers detected the immaterial bow waves of loyalist vindication.

  ‘How do you know you can trust him?’

  The question tore Lucius from the depths of his thoughts. Clarion was looking at him, studying him with glowing orbs of wet gold. It was a fair question, he admitted silently. There was precious little about their current situation that did sit well with him, though that begged the question of what, in the past centuries, ever had?

  He was master of a warband on the brink of collapse, the head of a body that had withered to the point of death. If the Cohors Nasicae were to survive another battle, they would need new blood. And in a realm where precious few options existed, this source was as close to reliable as any could hope for. Lucius would get the means to replenish his numbers, so long as he survived long enough to claim them.