Distant Echoes of Old Night

  DISTANT ECHOES OF OLD NIGHT

  Rob Sanders

  ‘And they called him… Death.’ Brother-Chaplain Morgax Murnau’s sermon hissed across the open vox-channel. His straight, black hair framed his pale face like curtains, parting to reveal a ghoulish leer. Standing amongst the drop pod descent cages, with his fat, grinning skull-helm clasped beneath one arm, the Chaplain spat his words into the clunky receiver of a master-vox. ‘The living embodiment of the end. The darkness we dread. The release we crave. The future we fear.’

  The Death Guard Chaplain stepped out onto the ramp-egress. The drop pod sat in the mire like a bulbous, rivet-plated tick. Everything oozed about him. The Chaplain’s slick oratory echoed among the petrified ferrouswoods, his dark words drifting over the sap-saturated morass like a mellifluous madness. The sermon was punctuated by the brief and occasional blast of stabiliser jets, as the drop pod’s machine spirit fought to keep the transport upright and from sinking into the swamp.

  ‘He brings you no more than your mortality demands. We play at perpetuity but we were not built for forever. Warmth will leave our great bodies. Our hearts will beat to empty echoes. Blood will sit stagnant in our veins and our flesh shall rot. Accept this.’

  Murnau peered out across the bubbling mire. The ground was sodden with decay. It was water-logged and crawling with parasites, gigapedes and clinker-shell lice. Ghostly clouds of midges swarmed and swirled across the percolating surface, filling the foetid air with the drone of a billion tiny wings.

  Murnau watched a drowning avian struggle in the muck; it flapped its sticky wings in frantic futility. Its hatchet beak had once gone to work on the heavy metal ferrouswood of titanic trunks but now it thrashed uselessly at the slime of microorganisms already breaking down its flesh.

  This place, Algonquis, had once been a verdant forest moon blessed with flocks of colourful beasts. They had roosted in the treetops and filled the hinterlands with harsh song. Below, sparse logging communities and indentured plantation workers had harvested ferrouswood with industrial chainaxe and saw. The dense timber was then used to supply off-world dustmills, workshops and factories in which some of the most durable lumber in the Imperium was put to myriad uses. The forest moon had been part of a sub-sector cornucopia of agri-worlds and mercantile trade-route hubs until the Death Guard frigate Barbarus’s Sting blistered through the region, visiting orbital decimation on world after Imperial world. Murnau had observed the ship’s commander select different varieties of apocalyptic biological weaponry for each victim-world, with the dreadful expertise of a true connoisseur. Engineered blights, atmospheric contaminants and galactic plagues long thought eradicated; all resurrected by Moritat Phorgal’s renegade Mechanicum adepts.

  Agri-world crops cankered in their continental fields. Droves of bloated livestock were impaled from the inside-out by the spore shafts of rampant fungal infestations. Clear, teeming oceans became vast expanses of sepia swill. For Algonquis, Phorgal had reserved an ecological decimant so destructive and voracious that even Murnau was surprised at how swiftly the forest moon had turned from a world of evergreen promise into a rotting ball of filth and corruption. Shrivelled needles rained to the forest floor while the great trunks of the ferrouswoods bled small lakes of sap, turning the rich, black soil into a sickly mire. Aggressive species of fungus ripped up through the pulp and bark of the trees, felling many of the titanic trees. Others remained as part of a petrified, skeletal forest of colossal stakes that pointed accusingly at the skies. Moulds and black mildew covered everything in a blanket of competing micro-organisms as local insect populations exploded, feeding off the carcass of a dying world.

  ‘Hear me, Latham,’ the Chaplain snarled into the vox-receiver. ‘You and your brother Imperial Fists are already dead – you just don’t know it yet. Where the sons of Mortarion walk, the will of the Death Lord prevails. We bring famine, pestilence, war and absolute destruction in its many forms. We bring the apocalypse in Mortarion’s name. We are the Death Guard, Captain Latham. We are the end to all.’ Murnau allowed his snarl to contort into an agonising smile.

  ‘But,’ the Chaplain said, raising a ceramite fingertip, ‘don’t make it too easy for us. Although we are here to escort you to the most final of destinations, death is meaningless without the sweet regret of a life well-lived. When my Destroyers take your life – and take it they will – I want you to have given your best. For the ache of loss to echo about your chest with the rattle of your last breath. Nothing pleases my lord more than placing the seeds of doubt in mortal hearts, seeds that bloom into gardens of darkness and despair, before having his instruments of death tear those hearts from forlorn and desperate chests. We are the instrument, captain. Know that no fortification or defence can save you. Know that no rescue is coming. Know that your Emperor has abandoned you.’

  Murnau’s helmet-vox chirped. He slammed the vox-receiver onto its wall-mounted cradle and slipped his battle-helm over his head.

  ‘Murnau here,’ he hissed.

  ‘I have Moritat Phorgal for you, Brother-Chaplain.’

  ‘Proceed.’

  Murnau snatched a drum-fed bolt pistol from the storage rack and holstered the weapon at his belt. With greater reverence he took his staff of office – his crozius arcanum – from its devotional harness. The short, adamantium staff was capped with the sculpture of a skeletal angel, its curved wings touching tip to tip and creating a brutal, spiked head to the revered weapon.

  Stepping off the ramp and into the mire, the murky floodwaters lapped like syrup against Murnau’s armoured knees. The Chaplain felt the saturated earth below take hold of his boots in its sucking grip, though his power-armoured tread was more than enough to break him free of the bog. Stomping through the filthy shallows, the Chaplain emerged from the shadow of the drop pod and set out through the petrified forest.

  ‘This is Phorgal,’ the helmet-vox crackled. The officer’s voice was a distant presence, like the echo about a tomb.

  ‘My brother in both life and death,’ Murnau returned. ‘The pod-relay is experiencing interference.’

  ‘It’s not the relay,’ Phorgal told him. ‘The Barbarus’s Sting breaks orbit.’

  ‘You’re leaving orbit?’ Murnau asked.

  ‘Long range augur-scans have revealed a victim flotilla entering the neighbouring system.’

  ‘Freighters?’

  ‘Granary ships – bulk container vessels accompanied by an Imperial Army escort cruiser,’ the Moritat informed him. ‘We are en route to bring the primarch’s judgement upon them.’

  ‘And we, to Dorn’s dogs down on the forest moon’s surface,’ Murnau assured him.

  As Murnau trudged through the mire, languid ripples rolling through the sap-waters, he felt the rotten pulp of fallen ferrouswoods crumble beneath the soles of his boots. The blackened, emaciated remnants still standing pierced the pestilent fog that hung like a shroud. The sticky surface of his battle plate became a trap for gangly flies and midges, and soon the suit was covered in dying insects.

  He saw a distant and momentary flash in the forest murk, followed by a wave of heat that disturbed the mist and registered on his suit’s autosenses. The broken blanket of fog revealed the Chaplain’s destination – ahead, reaching up amongst the disease-riddled trees, Murnau could make out the shattered outline of a crashed vessel.

  The massive debris section was one of five that the Death Guard had located upon the swampy Algonquisian surface. When the Barbarus’s Sting had encountered the Imperial Fists frigate Xanthus making its quiet approach through the decimated agri-worlds, Moritat Phorgal had unleashed all weapons upon the loyalist vessel. It had
tumbled to the moon’s foetid surface, breaking up as it fell.

  Phorgal had despatched the Chaplain to the crash site. His orders had been unequivocal: there were to be no survivors.

  ‘Murnau,’ the Moritat rasped across the vox. ‘Fenestra still hasn’t deciphered the astrotelepathic partial transmitted from the Xanthus.’

  ‘That’s… disappointing. We should have that bolt-magnet freak skinned alive. It disgusts me that we have to rely upon such degenerate humanity for our long-range communications.’

  ‘But there it is,’ Phorgal said.

  Murnau heard the officer take a sudden and rasping intake of breath. It was usually the herald of some kind of reproach; many times had Murnau heard it, before the Moritat rebuked a legionary inferior. ‘The fact is, Brother Murnau, there would be no astrotelepathic partial if your squad had brought the enemy to their ceramite knees.’

  Murnau bit back an involuntary explanation. He would offer no excuses: he was a Chaplain of the Death Guard. In the darkness, he was Mortarion’s all-seeing-eyes. In the silence, he was the primarch’s burning words. Where uncertainty reigned, Murnau was surety of the Death Lord’s vengeance… and Murnau was certain that uncertainty reigned in Vitas Phorgal’s hearts. Undoubtedly, this was why the Moritat liked to do the Warmaster’s bidding from a command deck throne.

  ‘Finish them, Morgax,’ Phorgal carped. ‘Finish them now.’

  ‘What of the nature of the communiqué?’ Murnau asked, changing the subject.

  ‘Fenestra says that it was coded,’ the Death Guard officer confided, ‘but not like any Legion code the witch has seen before. It is certainly not one used by the Imperial Fists. It doesn’t sound like a Legiones Astartes code at all.’

  ‘Destination?’

  ‘Sol,’ Phorgal replied, the Moritat’s voice suddenly laced with static. They were losing their vox-signal. ‘The vessel’s destination, given the frigate’s last recorded trajectory.’

  ‘Intriguing,’ Murnau said. ‘Well, the Xanthus was carrying something. Intelligence. Materiel. Supplies. Dorn will fortify his position, as is his nature. The Imperial Fists will hunker down and try to weather the coming storm. Let them try, I say, and let the Death Guard show them the futility of their lost cause.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Honoured Moritat, should the parameters of the mission be changed and this Terra-bound cargo be located and reported back to the Warmaster’s strategists?’

  ‘No,’ Phorgal crackled. ‘We leave such subtlety to our cousins in the XX Legion. This is war, and Mortarion’s sons deal in death, not in the gathering of meaningless details. Your orders remain. No survivors, Morgax. Do you hear me?’

  ‘It will be done,’ the Chaplain assured him.

  ‘The Barbarus’s Sting will return for you shortly,’ Phorgal said. ‘Then the tedium of the warp, and on to the fabricator moons of Uniplex Minora. Finish it, and make it quick.’

  As Murnau stepped through the sap drizzle and the shallows he saw another flash. His suit registered the heat backwash of a powerful weapon – it was coming from the shattered hull-section. The fog and midge swarms thinned, and the Chaplain took in the full majesty of Phorgal’s void-victory. The remnant was a mauled wreck. All that remained of the Xanthus was a midships gunnery section, the gothic majesty of which was dragging one end of the wreckage below the broiling swamp surface, as compartment after compartment flooded with filth.

  Murnau took in the objective with a tactician’s eye. With one end of the shattered section sinking, the other was rising like a metal mountain. The Chaplain cast his optics across the exposed guts of the vessel, wracked with fires and leaking various gases and hydraulic oils. The rents and tears in the crumpled hull plating were providing the loyalist forces with firing slits and opportunities to keep the assaulting Death Guard at bay. The stuttering fire of las-carbines and boltguns lay waiting for them.

  Cycling the vox-channels, Murnau found Sergeant Grull Gorphon barking savage orders to his squad. The Death Guard had taken position about the starboard flank of the frigate. It had suffered by far the worst impact damage and the Imperial Fists had done a frustrating job of fortifying the airlocks and barricading the hull breaches on the other approaches.

  The Chaplain found Gorphon’s warriors moving between the bolt-chewed trunks of petrified giants. Like Murnau, they had found a grim thrill in their surroundings; about them a world was dying, and from that finality a new life was emerging. It was a slithering, rank, appalling form of life, but life all the same. With the enemy intent on consolidating within the crashed Xanthus and with an entire frigate’s supply of ammunition at their disposal, the Death Guard were committed to leaving them no safe ground.

  Morgax Murnau believed that for every job there was a perfect tool. The Barbarus’s Sting carried one such tool among its Death Guard contingent. A blunt and uncompromising tool of ruthless decimation – Gorphon’s Destroyer squad, known as ‘the Graven’.

  The Destroyers attracted the worst from among the Legiones Astartes. Space Marines that Legion officers kept on a tight leash: the empty; the wilfully destructive; those for whom there was no quarter; those for whom the galaxy must burn. Where necessity dictated, however, the singular talents of these warriors were put to deadly use. Weapons of mass destruction were recovered from dark armoury depths, and the Destroyers’ appetite for annihilation was whetted by the prospect of battle, bloody and furious.

  No survivors, Phorgal had commanded. And Murnau had sent for the Graven.

  Sloshing through the bolt-plucked mire, Murnau came upon Zorrak – one of the Graven’s heavy weapons specialists. His armour was unpainted but filth-splattered to a fitting camouflage. With his backpack against the rotting trunk of a petrified ferrouswood, the Destroyer clutched the ungainly bulk of a missile launcher to his chest. Zorrak nodded his acknowledgement to the passing Chaplain – the movement parted the darkness of his long, matted hair, revealing the raw mask beneath. The whites of his eyes burned with a manic agitation from the patchwork of the Destroyer’s face, and his scabbed lips curled around a devilish smile. Zorrak jangled with the custom-loaded reserve warheads hanging from his belt.

  These were Terran-devised nightmares, terror weapons of the gene-war darkness of Old Night. With material harvested from decommissioned fusion reactors, the warheads were so radioactive that it was a wonder that Zorrak didn’t glow in the dark. Instead, he and his comrades bore the horrible cost of handling such hideous weaponry in the burns and scarring afflicting their battle-bred forms.

  The Chaplain leaned back as a stream of las-fire tore through the mildew-threaded bark at Zorrak’s shoulder. The Destroyer gritted his gleaming white teeth before throwing his armoured body around – he leaned into the missile launcher and aimed it at the shattered frigate. Missile after missile tore out of the bucking launcher, and the derelict vessel became enveloped in a cluster of blinding halos as the localised blasts of the rad-missiles ripped through the hull and vessel structure. Some tore rents and twisted cavities into much larger breach-points for the waiting Death Guard. Others set off internal chains of explosions that migrated through the wreckage, forcing Legion serfs from their sentry-points and shrouding the interior with intensely toxic radioactive material.

  Stomping between the cover of the largest ferrouswoods, the mire threatening to hold onto every bootfall, the Chaplain received the greeting of individual Destroyers in the form of mad eyes and sneers of ulcerated delight. All of Gorphon’s squad carried the radiation burns and sickly hang-dog expressions of their calling. Moving in on the shattered section, the Destroyers splashed from trunk to trunk, chunky bolt pistols in each gauntlet and pausing only to lob rad-grenades into the derelict. They riddled the sinking section with alternating streams of brute-calibre rounds, roaring their sick glee at the loyalist attempts to cut them down.

  From the wreckage of the Xanthus came the boom of a colossal carriage locking mechanism. Murnau knew
that sound. His helmet vox-channel became a cacophony of warnings.

  ‘Incoming!’ he heard Sergeant Gorphon bellow to his men.

  The Chaplain cast his optics across the smashed flank of the frigate. The magna-bore barrel of a single cannon had been rolled out from the darkness of a mangled gunport. Somehow Captain Latham had got one of the remaining cannons operational and his survivors had manhandled it into position on its warped carriage.

  There was no cover that could save Murnau from the plasma blast – the open ground and smouldering ferrouswood stumps testified to that. The cannon was devastating in its capabilities but clumsy without a calibrated way to aim the weapon. From the angle of the gargantuan barrel, Murnau estimated only a grazing vector at best. The improvised crew behind the beast would not want to waste the shot and the Chaplain assumed the loyalists would rather aim high than blast uselessly into the mire.

  ‘Do your worst,’ Murnau hissed through his teeth. Calmly, he knelt down in the shallows and bowed his skull-helm. ‘For death is nothing to fear–’

  Everything went white.

  The roar of ship-to-ship weaponry shook him to his bones. His battle plate’s autosenses momentarily clipped out, and the sap about him boiled to a bank of filthy steam.

  Before his optics had even been restored, Murnau leapt back to his feet, a gaunt grin of self-satisfaction on his face. As he predicted, the plasma beam had passed above their position and blasted its way through the petrified ferrouswoods beyond. The barrel of the great weapon had gone, shunted back on its colossal carriage, but through the open gunport Murnau sensed he was being regarded with disappointed eyes.

  Moving on through the syrupy murk Murnau found an approving Sergeant Gorphon waiting for him. Two horribly scarred members of the Graven, Brother-Destroyers Khurgul and Gholic, were yelling ripe abuse at the sinking derelict from the necrotic trunks, goading the Imperial Fists within. They hammered the open and more vulnerable areas of the wreck with their monstrous pistols and tossed clutches of grenades at the structure, the detonations of which bathed the swamp in a radioactive haze that killed the flies and made the shattered hull of the Xanthus shimmer. For a few minutes now, Murnau had suffered the background crackle of radioactivity, filtered through his battle plate. His suit told him what he already knew – that death, in one of its myriad forms, hung heavily over the whole area.