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  Superficially it might have appeared as though two brawny giants, immobilised but for the sway of their torsos, were about to jab and slash at one another, piercing and flaying till the vampire bat device decided that sufficient flesh had been sliced, that sufficient blood had coagulated in slim cinnabar threads.

  Not so. Sublime grace and accuracy, a ballet of two blades almost dancing together in an aerial pas de deux was the aesthetic of the duel – for a minute, two minutes, three, till a single quicksilver cheek wound decided the contest.

  The brothers saluted each other.

  “I apologise for my opinion,” announced the loser formally. “You grace me with your mark of honour. I thank you. I’m in your debt.”

  “Nay,” said the victor courteously, “but I am in yours.”

  Released, they stepped from the duelling blocks. Servitors hurried to them bearing great foaming stone steins – one red, one black – to drink in one draught, then smash together into shards.

  The umpire stepped forward to scrutinise the pattern of the fallen pieces, to divine how well these two brothers had knitted their relationship.

  SOME WEEKS LATER, the tocsin bell rang out throughout the fortress-monastery. With joy in their hearts, all brothers paused wherever they were to recite an angelus of annihilation aimed at the Emperor’s enemies. Lexandro almost wept.

  For yes, oh yes: the first mission of the new Marine Scouts would indeed now inevitably be in support of a major campaign of full Crusade status…

  PART TWO

  THE KARKASON CRUSADE

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  IN THE RUDDILY-LIT belly of the drop-ship, Yeremi clung to one of the serpentine wall grips as the vessel vibrated. Its hull wailed and its engine whined as the upper atmosphere of Karkason roughly and frustratedly caressed this plasteel intruder which was penetrating it. The world’s airy hands were burning with friction. Within that craft were seeds of destruction that would soon burst forth.

  Yeremi’s fellow Scouts held tight, yelling loud prayers to Rogal Dorn, to the approval of their sergeants. The howl of atmospheric entry almost drowned their voices.

  “Primarch, Progenitor, oil our coming upon this planet of peril—”

  “Then let that oil blaze—”

  “That we may swiftly pierce all defences, as our commanders have conceived we shall—”

  “That we may abort all evil—”

  “To Your Glory, and the Glory of Him on Earth…”

  “And for the sake of the greater justice,” Yeremi murmured to himself as a personal amen.

  “Yazoooo!” one of the Scouts from Quinspirus cried in his hive patois, courteous and reverent speech forgotten in the heat of the moment, and Imperial Gothic neglected. His head was shaven but for a topknot. Baring black-stained teeth, he ululated, “Zooyaaaa-yaa-yaa!” The rising screech from cleaving gases outside almost drowned this battlecry.

  “Yaa-yaa-yaa,” chorused some other Quinspirites.

  Two squads of Fists in full battle armour crowded the fore of the compartment, standing rigidly, gripping their boltguns and chainswords, the magnetics of their boots locking them to the cleated deck. They would exit under cover of darkness at one of numerous drop-zones fifty kilometres from the vast sprawl of Sagramoso City. Then the ship would jink even closer in to a prosperous hilly suburb, if possible, to offload the terror Scouts.

  The sergeants who would supervise the Scouts were wearing hybrid body armour of eagle plastrons, flexible leggings, and great shoulder plates embossed with jewelled axes, but no helmets – for the more lightly-armoured Scouts wore no covering to their heads, either.

  Still muttering the word justice, Yeremi gazed at the quatrefoil viewscreen. One segment showed a whale-like troop carrier descending towards the world below, carrying one of the regiments of Imperial Guard which had been ordered to attend this conflict, years since in realtime.

  Another segment displayed the night side of planet Karkason: a swell of blackness pricked with intermittent little red pimples which were the mouths of its active volcanoes – those, at least, which were not currently cloaked by smoke.

  In a third segment, blurred by magnification, loomed the coaly bulge of the capital city from which searing threads of light lanced skywards, a shifting vertical mesh of beams issuing from the ground defence lasers. Even as Yeremi watched, an incoming diversionary frigate flared and disintegrated.

  The fourth section of the screen was scanning a wrecked enemy orbital battle station that was tumbling slowly end over end, locked together with the ruptured cruiser which had finally rammed it to neutralise it. Debris and tiny bodies circled like a halo of scurf, brightening periodically as those metal shards and corpses tilted to catch the sunlight of space.

  Another sacrifice frigate erupted into a gorgeous, noble orange fireball over the city.

  “Seven minutes to drop-zone.” The pilot’s emotionless voice issued from a brass loudspeaker wrought in the shape of a snake’s gaping, fanged mouth. By now the bucking roar of entry had subsided into a sibilant trembling caress imperceptible against the engine throb except to possessors of Lyman’s Ears. “Prepare to adjust to planetary gravity. Artificial gravity off in five seconds. Off!”

  The floor tilted forwards, and Yeremi felt heavier.

  “Right,” snapped Sergeant Juron. “Wolverine Squad: Why are we here on Karkason?”

  “To skrag,” said Tundrish before Yeremi could frame an answer, grinning with those sharpened teeth of his. “To mega-skrag.” And indeed that reply was accurate enough, as regards the Scouts. Had the ex-scumnik’s laboriously acquired veneer rubbed away, though, at the prospect of mayhem?

  That crazy snob d’Arquebus curled his lip at such a response. “We’re here because Lord Sagramoso is a damned heretic against the Emperor, stirring up other heretics.”

  “An infidel,” agreed swarthy Omar Akbar, he whose cheeks were branded with curious symmetrical runes. “The Emperor is great.” Akbar was from a desert land-train clan.

  “And you, Valence, what do you think?”

  “We’re here to restore true universal law,” said Yeremi. “But also… Karkason is a source of the best power crystals used in battle armour.”

  D’Arquebus chuckled. “Spoken like a true practical tech. One with a cosmic mission, too. You’ll protect us from our own excesses down there, won’t you?”

  “Jus’ don’ try to spoil the fun,” said Tundrish, slipping into argot.

  Juron glanced at those two contentious spirits. Now that the ex-cadets were initiated Scouts, they could speak out of their own accord. Yet even so…

  “I thought you three from Trazior were like Siamese triplets joined at the hearts,” the sergeant said. “Hauling each other from the Tunnel of Terror as you did…”

  “Yeah,” said Tundrish, “but our blood’s poison to each other. Sort of addictive poison, though!”

  Juron frowned. “I can visualise you three duelling many times till you inoculate yourselves against any trace of enmity.”

  D’Arquebus smiled ethereally. “Oh, I do not see us duelling… ever.” Which part of him was saying so? The mystic devotee of Dorn? Or the residual high-hab swanker?

  “All your answers are correct,” said Juron, “and yours,” he told Yeremi, “is strategically perceptive. But,” and he nodded at Tundrish, “your reply best describes what our Scout squads must do now: help restore true law through wanton terrorism. The more inventive, the better. You few must seem to be many.”

  “One minute to drop-zone. Fists: prepare.” The vessel shook and rocked. Was it drawing fire?

  THE AIM OF this crusade was not to devastate, as such. Not as the prime objective, though that might well be a consequence. The desired result was the obliteration ad extremum fetum, down to the last foetus, of the entire entrenched Sagramaso clan, hereditary rulers of Karkason.

  Karkason was – or had been – a sooty jewel in the Imperium. From certain of its volcanoes poured rivers of lava rich in transuranic ele
ments including psycurium, invaluable in the crafting of psychic hoods and force swords such as Marine Librarians could use. During other eruptions, power crystals forged in the deep magma were scattered far and wide across the lava plains, sometimes killing the harvesters. Many of those plains were made of purest vitrodur, the inky armour-glass from which vast Sagramoso City – the “black chandelier of the Imperium” – was largely carved.

  Lord Sagramoso’s writ had run to the other barren planets of Karka’s Sun, and to those of its runtish red dwarf binary twin, Karka Secundus, including some small mining world in orbit around the twin.

  In the effervescence of his accession as His Lordship thirty years earlier, Fulgor Sagramoso had declared himself to be an independent sovereign ruler and a god. He was prepared to conclude a trade pact with the Imperium on his own terms, a treaty of one god with another. To prove his divinity he had the praetorians of his planetary guard butcher all the preachers of the Imperial Cult and all Administratum officials whom he could catch – while the Pontifex of the Imperial Cult was winched down into a volcano.

  Ten years later, the Imperium registered that Karkason had lapsed into heresy. Fifteen years later, it became obvious that Lord Sagramoso was seducing the hereditary lords of neighbouring star systems – mainly agricultural ones – to turn preachers into compost and swear fealty to him rather than to a deity thirty thousand light years distant.

  Twenty years after the vulcanisation of the Pontifex, plans for Crusade began – for the wheels of the Imperium often ground slow; but certainly they must pulverise the Sagramoso clan to dust, to microns, and install a new loyal commanding dynasty. An upstart mini-emperor was anathema.

  Orbital laser platforms aside, much of the surface of Karkason was undefended. Yet what virtue was there in capturing a whole chain of volcanoes, or in subduing a lake of lava? Sagramoso City itself was heavily guarded by skyward laser batteries, and these could not easily be neutralised. Precision laser fire from an altitude would be reflected, scattered by the vitrodur shields of the city’s architecture. The blazing inferno of a plasma package likewise would wreak little major havoc upon such volcano-forged material – while barrage bombs and thermonukes would leave precious little by way of city or population to command. Organs of the Imperium fed on psycurium and power crystals as a sickly gourmet on oysters. A dyspeptic, phlebitic, tuberculous – yet still bellicose – gourmet, to whom such rarified nourishment was as a staff of life…

  Whilst the heart of that entity fed on… worship, which was being damnably denied.

  The planetary guard of a godling despot must be assumed to be numerous and very well-armed – though how well-experienced?

  Hence the landing of the Imperial Guard to dilute the acid of resistance, and allow over seven hundred Space Marines led by Lord Vladimir Pugh to spearhead a fierce organised drive against the capital and the praetorian troopers, with whom they would cope.

  While Scouts would skrag that city randomly – fleas with terrible bites…

  THE SHIP WAS down. Hauling himself higher up the brass serpent, Yeremi squinted over the helmets of Fists as three Land Raiders roared out across a ramp from the adjacent larger hold, onto a fossilised sea of undulating ebon lava.

  Skidding somewhat, the broad tracks of the vehicles struck fire from the vitrified surface, as steel from flint. Their lascannon ball turrets swivelled alertly but nothing else seemed to be in the vicinity.

  Already the Fists were disembarking at the double. Streamers of smoke and ash streaked the night sky, obliterating most of the stars, though one of Karkason’s egg-shaped moons shone through, reproducing its image some way off in the shiny lava as an illusory silver pool, a distorted cool medallion. Briefly Yeremi scented the char of combustion on the incoming breeze, then the hatch pistoned upward to seal the vessel again, and it powered aloft, to veer wildly – low and jinking – toward the outskirts of the city.

  Those pitch-black skirts…

  Within which, behind which, a multitude of lights lurked faintly, intrinsically bright lights filtered by obsidian and vitrodur so as to resemble a swarm of phosphorescent creatures seen mutedly afar in some great oceanic abysmal valley that was deep and very long and very wide…

  Above which, an embroidery of light flickered in and out of existence, stitching hints of a sampler spelling out death.

  The drop-ship had jarred down, skidding some way; the hatch-ramp slammed open. In a trice the Wolverines and the other four Scout squads were outside with their sergeants, and scattering in different directions. Already the emptied drop-ship, lip still hanging open, that steel tongue lolling out like an imbecile’s, was lifting off again, engine roaring, a burning blast-wind buffeting.

  Initially the pilot may have been uncertain whether the surface – of black upon black, with deep-down submerged glow-globes – was solid or deceitful. Now the surrounding squat towers of glossy darkness, with dully glowing hearts resembling X-rayed organs, were perhaps disorienting him – while overhead the sky was cross-stitched with hundreds of thinnest pulsing lines of coherent light, appearing, disappearing, rendering incandescent whatever atmospheric dust they stabbed through. Their origin, the city; their goal, incoming ships. The laser mesh shifted constantly, those two-dimensional searchlights knitting a lethal, spasming cat’s cradle, perhaps operated by computer-minded lexmeks cyborged and slaved to their weapons.

  As the drop-ship yawed away, fleeing, a hem of the cat’s cradle dipped towards it. Threads of light gleamed. The ship flared, briefly brightening the scene below – whereas earlier the distorted reflections of that ethereal lacework strobing from the ebon city had only confused the eye. The vessel Yeremi had been riding in scant tens of seconds earlier erupted, disintegrated.

  He and Tundrish, d’Arquebus, Akbar, and the sergeant hunched by the base of a stubby vitreous tower.

  Yeremi shook his head and rubbed his eyes. His surroundings were so suddenly and so totally novel. He saw so much and so keenly, his vision enhanced by his Occulobe. Yet what was he seeing? What was the meaning of all the vast patterns and shapes, of this darkness visible? Of this great brooding complex mineral creature they had been dropped in the midst of – safely, yes, into a pocket of calm and inattention, locally barren of signs of life… though barren for how long?

  And here was only a human place. This wasn’t any alien habitat, where even geometry might be twisted out of shape.

  Tundrish appeared dazed by the environment too. Yeremi almost clung to the former undercity dweller, whether out of strange fellow feeling or only for support he could not have said. Or whether mutually to reinforce their ability to perceive and understand this city – two view-points yielding a stereoscopic perspective.

  Almost clung. Almost. The binding magnetism of their triadic relationship – his and Tundrish’s and d’Arquebus’ – was as ever fluxing between positive and negative, attraction and repulsion. Disdain for one another was a sticky, bittersweet glue. Rivalry was a rivet piercing through their bones, uniting those in a danse macabre, a shifting pas de trois. Like mantises that eat their mates, or are eaten by them during intimate congress – even knowing that such a fate must occur – they were fraternally drawn to one another, obeying a bizarre tropism.

  The callous incident of the heat-sink… but then: hands linked in the Tunnel of Terror… the upper-habber had come back for his two companions, for whatever reason… Atonement? Hardly! Condescension? Maybe…

  D’Arquebus himself was at once sneering and praying for clarity.

  “Think what you see!” urged Sergeant Juron.

  All of a sudden, for Yeremi at least, there was law in his surroundings. There was rule. There was order. He chanted an old Valence family incantation, an enigmatic invocation used by his clan when switching on machinery: “Artifex armifer digitis dextris oculis occultist.” For he was perceiving the tech of Sagramoso City.

  Huge umbrellas of black vitrodur atop turrets… umbrellas that could, and indeed were closing up into cones a
nd steeples. Obsidian-carapaced buildings, vitreous canopies, cupolas… Edifices resembling giant bells carved of jet… Sleek towers that were telescoping down into the undercity, leaving great smooth plazas where they had previously reared, chequerboard-patterned spaces with a hint of roof outlines. Other buildings contracting and infolding like armoured animals under attack, cubes becoming pyramids.

  This city could reconfigure parts of itself, great vitrodur panels sliding smoothly, tilting, canting. Shafts opening up and closing… Roads that rolled over, twisting to become walls. Level below level of roads. Coiling ramps that corkscrewed up and down.

  A city-machine, of glossy black sliding glass…

  And not absolutely black, oh no. Now that Yeremi perceived those shapes – some of which were shifting, as he watched – he also distinguished a rich spectrum of dark hues: purple, indigo, amethyst.

  On the horizon a dull storm of light began to flash as though the edge of the world was short-circuiting. Muted thumps muttered of far explosions. Imperial Guard must already have encountered the rebel Planetary Defence Force – or the other way about.

  The other three Scout squads had promptly vanished with their sergeants, hastening off into the glossy dark entrails of the city-machine, but Juron seemed content to pause a while. Yeremi realised that during these precious moments Juron was allowing his Wolverine Squad to lose their umwelt-virginity, to embrace the shattering impact of the utterly new. Thereafter, Yeremi himself would never again be fazed by being decanted into any foreign environment. He would adjust to it automatically with deadly machine precision. Or so he hoped.

  Yeremi sniffed the faintly singed air: a hint of ash smuts, scorched dust, the odour of the volcanic plains, a warm caustic balm.

  “And understand what you hear!”