Dark Hunters: Umbra Sumus

TWENTY-ONE

Servo an Sacramentum

The lines were contracting, eaten away inexorably hour upon hour, day on day. And those who defended the line grew ever fewer.

‘You’re sure the message got through?’ Kerne demanded.

The eldar farseer crouched beside him in the shell-hole and rubbed at the blood which had dried on the blade of her spear.

‘Thirty-six hours ago, by this world’s reckoning,’ Te Mirah said. ‘It was acknowledged by a powerful psyker of your kind. He had a name…’ she thought upon it. ‘Grey? No, Graes.’

‘Graes Vennan?’

‘Yes, that was it. He did not welcome our attempts to communicate – we had to try three times, using the words you gave us, before he would accept that we were not bent on mischief.’

‘And the return message?’

‘Two words – Umbra Sumus.’ Te Mirah cocked her head to one side in puzzlement. ‘I take it they mean something to you?’

‘You could say that,’ Kerne said, and he smiled inside his helm.

‘Captain, it will be some time before your people can come to your relief – even with a fair passage through the warp.’

‘We are talking weeks, not days. I know that. But you have fulfilled your half of the bargain, this I acknowledge.’

‘It remains to be seen if it is possible to complete the transaction.’

‘It has been two days since our people entered the mines. That is not yet indicative of either success or failure.’

‘Agreed. And the Circuit is still in existence. I can feel it – though it is faint now, the music. As though it is being constrained in some way.’

Te Mirah did not voice her other concern. The mind of Ainoc was shrouded from her now – the warlock’s psychic imprint had dimmed with the passage underground, which was to be expected, but now there was no sense of him at all, and this disquieted her.

If these mon-keigh meant to play her in the same way she had played them, well then things would take a very unpleasant turn indeed.

She came back to the present. In her mind she felt the presence of her people, fighting in the smoking ruins ahead. Callinall was dug in there with her rangers, picking off the enemy while the guardian warriors laid down a withering stream of shuriken fire.

To their left, a company of the human militia were fighting, their lines centred on three heavy-weapons positions, and to the right was a squad of the Adeptus Astartes, barely to be seen despite their bulk. They fired and then moved and then fired again, keeping the enemy assault off balance.

Te Mirah had seen the Adeptus Astartes fight before, on other worlds and in other centuries, but she had never seen tactics such as those these Dark Hunters utilised. They were familiar to her – the Space Marines kept moving, then struck from carefully chosen concealed positions, before moving again. And they relied on their camouflage as much as on their armour. These were tactics that an eldar autarch could appreciate, and their proponents fascinated her despite herself.

‘I never thought you would agree,’ she found herself saying to Jonah Kerne. Honesty is becoming a habit with me, she thought even as the words left her mouth.

‘To our bargain? I knew if I did not that I would be consigning my brothers in Mortai to defeat, and this world to destruction,’ Kerne said.

‘Your skull-faced colleague does not see it that way.’

‘Brother Malchai is a Reclusiarch, a guardian of faith and orthodoxy. It is his mission to keep my brethren pure and untainted.’

‘He would rather see them dead than cooperating with xenos – he has said as much.’

‘Yes. But I am the force commander here. It is my word which is spoken last. My decision stands.’

‘Captain, I sense that even if you prevail upon this planet, and emerge somehow victorious from this tide of blood, the bargain you have made with me will come back to haunt you.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ Jonah Kerne said simply. ‘But if it means Mortai survives, then I will count it worth the trouble.’

Elijah Kass joined them, his blue armour smeared with filth. Both he and Brother Malchai had thus far refused to don the cameleoline paint, and the Librarian stood out against the dun browns and greys of the battlefield.

‘Another armoured column is forming up to the south,’ he said, staring at Te Mirah in some distaste. ‘General Dietrich is mustering his remaining tanks to meet it, but he wants heavy-weapons support.’

Kerne blinked on the tactical readouts within his helmet. ‘Quincus squad, establish a blocking position three hundred metres to your north-west. Dig in the meltaguns and prepare to support the Guard. Acknowledge.’

‘I hear you, captain.’ That was Brother-Sergeant Kagan. His squad was down to six battle-brothers, but they were all Kerne could spare from the main line.

‘Tell me when you are in position, Kagan.’

‘Acknowledged. Moving now.’

‘They’re trying to cut us in half again,’ Brother Kass said. ‘We cannot keep this line whole for much longer.’

‘We must, if we are to hold the Armaments District,’ Jonah Kerne told him. And the entrance to the mines, he thought.

‘I will bring another team of my people up to reinforce you,’ Te Mirah said. Kerne inclined his helm in response.

The eldar witch was playing the game well. Her warriors were fighting and dying beside his own with no hint of treachery as yet. It would remain so until the outcome to Fornix’s expedition was known. After that, there was no telling what these xenos would do.

But he found himself admitting to a grudging respect for the farseer. She fought well, and more than once she had single-handedly turned the tide of a critical combat by plunging into the fray with that wicked spear and the psychic energies she wielded along with it. Kerne had seen her fell an entire squad of Punisher warriors with a dazzling storm of psychic energy. When the time came, she would prove a formidable foe.

She seemed to sense the drift of his thoughts, and was watching him. He guarded his mind as best he could.

‘It is nothing I have not already concluded myself, captain,’ she said. ‘We are allies of convenience only – we both know that.’

He turned away. ‘I must walk the line. Brother Kass, you will remain here with the–’ he almost said witch. ‘With the farseer.’ Keep an eye on her.

Elijah Kass nodded.

Kerne strode off. As he went, he felt the leather pouch which housed Mortai’s banner slap against his thigh. He would not unfurl it, not yet. The banner was for the end, when he needed to give his brethren a last focus. And besides, his brothers were trying to remain unseen – a banner flying above their heads would undo that.

He did long to see it fly, though. To bring some glory to this ugly, desperate fight.

For fully twelve kilometres through the ruins of Askai, the Dark Hunters held the line along with Dietrich’s men and Te Mirah’s eldar. As unlikely a combination of allies as had ever been seen on the battlefields of the Imperium, their positions ebbed and flowed along with the assaults made by the Punisher warbands. The Imperium-held ground resembled an hourglass in shape, the top being the citadel, which although heavily bombed by air attack and artillery was still capable of dealing out an enormous amount of punishment. The bottom was the Armaments District with its massive interior walls and reinforced manufactoria. The waist of the hourglass was the vulnerable spot, comprising what had once been the spaceport. This narrow killing-ground had to be maintained if communications between the two strongholds were to survive, and if the citadel were to continue to receive its nightly convoy of munitions.

The landing pads of the spaceport had long since been torn up into a shell-shattered wasteland, criss-crossed with trenches and pocked with heavy-weapons strongpoints. But it was still more open than the rest of the ruined city, and it was here that the enemy had thrown attack after attack, spearheaded by their armour. With the aid of the Dark Hunters, what was left of Dietrich’s armour had thrown back these assaults, but now his regiment was down to barely half a dozen vehicles, all of them damaged in some way. And Dietrich had lost a thousand men in the last two days.

It could not go on like this – some part of the line would have to be sacrificed so that they could consolidate on the rest.

A sigil popped up in Kerne’s readout that he had not seen in more than forty hours. He broke into a run towards the coordinates, moving faster than any unencumbered human athlete could hope to, and when he ran full-tilt into a squad of Punisher warriors, he barely broke stride.

Biron Amadai’s ancient bolt pistol came up and fired six three-round bursts, downing three of the enemy – then Kerne had barrelled into the others before the bodies even hit the ground, weaving and spinning with the chainsword at full power. He kicked a dead Punisher into two more, decapitated a third, and smashed the butt of the bolt pistol into the skull of the last, just hard enough to disorientate the head inside the ceramite casque. He felt the impact of bolter rounds as they scored his antique armour, and the pain as one pierced his side deep enough to flatten against the carapace which underlay his skin.

He ground the chainsword into the face of the one who had shot him, the blades churning through metal, then flesh and bone. And then he bent and put four more rounds through the heads of the warriors he had knocked down.

The entire skirmish took perhaps twenty seconds, and then Kerne was running again, hissing as his body began to repair itself and stem the bleeding from his side. The flashing sigils in his helm went from red to amber to flickering green again. He blinked on the tactical overlay once more – yes, there was no mistake.

Fornix was back.

He made his way into the Armaments District, all the while keeping track of the counterattack going on up to the north, shifting squads around like a man plugging ten leaks with five fingers. Dietrich’s men made way before him as he strode through the manufactoria, past the roaring machinery and the exhausted, half-starved figures who manned it, until finally he was at the main entrance to the mines. A group of Guardsmen had gathered there, and two Space Marines.

Only two.

One was Heinos, his outline unmistakeable. The other was Fornix, though Kerne would not have known Mortai’s first sergeant without the blinking sigil on the tactical outlay to guide him. The armour of both warriors was scorched black, down to the shining ceramite in some places. In others, it had been eaten away like leprous tissue. Acid damage. Kerne could see by the very way they stood that both his brethren were wounded, and weary beyond any human conception of the word.

But what had happened to the eldar?

On the vox, he said: ‘Apothecary Passarion, to the mines’ entrance, best speed.’ And to the pair of Space Marines before him: ‘Report.’

Fornix unhelmed slowly. His face was haggard, and there was the scar of a still-healing burn down the side of his neck.

‘Well, we got the thing we went for, for what it’s worth. The eldar are all dead – not at our hands – well, not all at our hands. There were wraithlords guarding their damned relic, and they took a lot of beating before they went down.’

‘Our people?’ Kerne asked quietly.

‘Brothers Steyr and Pendar died well. Without them we would not have survived. Brother Gad perished in a stupid accident on the way back.’ Fornix’s face clouded. ‘A slip of the foot, that’s all it was. He went into acid.’

‘Their gene-seed?’ Kerne asked.

‘Lost, all of it.’

The captain sighed. ‘Where is this thing the eldar deem so important?’

‘I have it, captain,’ Brother Heinos said. ‘Tucked in below my servo-arm, out of sight.’

‘Does it look like a weapon, brother – something that could be used against us?’

The Techmarine hesitated a bare second. ‘I would say no. The xenos named Ainoc said it was a repository of eldar souls, and I believe he was not lying. When he found it, his reaction was one of extreme joy – and that was his undoing. If it is a weapon, then it was not one he was able to use. It availed him nothing against the machine-spirits of the things that killed him.’

Kerne nodded. ‘Thank you, brother.’

‘Brother Heinos did well down there,’ Fornix said. ‘He saved my life.’ And he grinned, some of his old fire lighting up his face. ‘It just goes to show, Jonah, Techmarines are good for something after all.’

There was the counterattack to oversee, reserves to move around yet again. Another bloody day on Ras Hanem went down into the dark, and the fighting went on into the night. There was no let-up in it now.

Jonah Kerne called a conference of the Dark Hunters command in the early hours, once the frayed lines had been stabilised somewhat. Brother Malchai was there, as well as Apothecary Passarion, Fornix – his armour now made even uglier by a series of hasty repairs – Finn March, who was the senior sergeant after Fornix, and Elijah Kass, who had finally been persuaded to don cameleoline paint on his armour so that he might not prove to be so much of a bullet-magnet.

Jonah Kerne doffed his helm and looked at them all. They were crouched in a ruined basement, overlooked by the shattered remains of one of the city hive-scrapers. It had collapsed the day before, and now there were only twenty storeys of wrecked framework still standing of a building that had once towered hundreds of metres.

The night was dark as pitch, except for the flashes of artillery lighting up the horizon and the spatter of errant tracer through the sky. Above them, they could see the stars that were not stars wheeling in orbit above the city. The Punisher fleet, looking down on them.

‘Brothers, I would have you listen to me, and take a look at this.’

Kerne produced the Infinity Circuit from under a filthy cloth. The gleam and shine of it threw blue light on their helms, reflecting in the blank lenses. The egg-shaped artefact was a thing of such beauty that even the hardened Space Marines were silent, gazing upon it.

Kerne covered it up again.

‘It is this thing which has brought the eldar to Ras Hanem, and this alone. As you know, I made a bargain with the xenos leader. In return for her help with our communications, and the assistance of her warriors, I agreed to let her search for it. That part of the bargain has been kept, but all of her people died in the keeping of it, and so this thing comes to us. I ask you – what should I do with it? Do I try to destroy it, or keep it for investigation by the Inquisition?

‘Or do I keep my word and hand it over to the xenos?’

‘It is a device of an enemy species, and thus warrants destruction,’ Brother Malchai said. Kerne had expected no less from the Chapter Reclusiarch.

‘It’s an odd weapon, if that’s what it is,’ Fornix said. ‘I told you before, Jonah, I do not think this gew-gaw is a hazard to us. Valuable to the xenos, yes, but that is all.’

‘I sense no danger in it,’ the Librarian, Elijah Kass agreed. ‘There are many voices within, raised like a choir. It contains memories, and pictures I can only glimpse, but there is no hostility there. It is alive, but inert at the same time.’

‘Can the egg hatch?’ Malchai argued. ‘We do not know. We have no way of guessing what this thing might be used for. It should be destroyed, captain.’

Finn March spoke up for the first time. He took off his helm and looked Kerne in the eye.

‘Captain, all I know is that I have four battle-brothers remaining out of the nine I jumped with, and holding the line with them right at this moment are squads of these xenos. They have been fighting beside us now for almost three days, and they have helped us stem at least four major assaults. I speak merely as a combat leader – if the eldar become our enemies too, then the line will fold, and we will have to fall back to the citadel.’

Brother Malchai clenched a fist. ‘Brother-sergeant, are you suggesting that brothers of the Adeptus Astartes cannot hold their positions without the aid of filthy xenos?’

‘Yes, Reclusiarch, I am, and believe me when I say it is a bitter pill to swallow. We are over-extended as it is. If the eldar pull out, then we will have to redraw our positions drastically.’

‘He’s right,’ Fornix said. ‘I inspected the lines this evening. Jonah, there are fifty-two of us still standing. The militia and the Guard do their best, but aside from the gunners in the citadel, Dietrich is now down to three tanks and a few understrength battalions. Even with the help of the eldar, we will need to consider withdrawals by morning. Without them, many of our positions will be overrun almost at once.’

There was a silence as this sank in.

‘Better to die clean, than live with tainted honour,’ Malchai murmured.

Jonah Kerne touched the leather sheath at his hip in which Mortai’s ancient banner resided.

‘Honour?’ he said. ‘Brother Malchai, I gave my word to the eldar farseer. She has kept hers – must I break mine?’

‘You gave it to a xeno, from a race famed for its deceit,’ Malchai told him implacably. ‘There is no honour at stake.’

Kerne’s face hardened. ‘I see your reasoning, and there is much to recommend it. But I have been thinking over this since Fornix returned from the mines. I cannot agree with you, brother.’

‘You’re going to hand it over,’ Elijah Kass said, disbelief in his voice. ‘Captain–’

‘Let this be on my head alone. Brothers, the Kharne will be moving stone and stars to come to our relief. We have but to hold on here, even as General Dietrich did.’

‘Dietrich was allowed to survive to draw us in,’ Malchai rasped.

‘He fought for fifteen weeks in this charnel house. We can survive for as long, whether the Punishers wish it or no. We are Adepts of the Stars, brothers of the Dark Hunters Chapter, and we will not go gently into the night.’

Kerne stood up. The Infinity Circuit was balanced in the palm of his gauntlet, a faint glow visible through the cloth which covered it.

‘I have made my decision. I will keep my word to those who have kept theirs, and I will bear the consequences of that on my shoulders alone. Brother Malchai, you may make of that what you will. I respect your faith, your courage and your integrity – even in the worst of our disagreements, I have never doubted your loyalty and commitment to Mortai and to the Chapter. But I am the commander here, and I must consider the military realities of the situation as well as the niceties of the Codex.’

‘On your head be it, Jonah,’ Malchai muttered, and he seemed genuinely grieved.

‘Brothers,’ Kerne said, ‘the endgame of this little adventure lies before us, but it is a simple one. We must fight, and survive. That is all. If only one of us is still standing when relief arrives, then we will have been victorious here.’

He looked at his brothers. Malchai was staring at the ground, and Kass seemed deeply troubled.

‘Brother Passarion, I want you to secure the gene-seed of our fallen brethren and conceal it in the depths of the citadel, at the very heart of our strongest defences. If it survives, then so will Mortai.’

At that moment, with the Infinity Circuit in the very palm of his hand, Kerne realised the irony of the order. And it made him more sure than ever that he was doing the right thing – the necessary thing. He was trying to preserve some relic of his company for the future even as the eldar had done.

‘It shall be so, captain,’ the Apothecary said, as impassive as always.

‘Finn, go to the line squads, and warn them that we will be making a fighting withdrawal before dawn. I intend to evacuate the Armaments District. We have stockpiled enough munitions in the citadel now to last through weeks of siege. We are going to fall back to the fortress.’

‘And the eldar with us?’ Malchai asked sharply.

‘That is up to the eldar, Reclusiarch. I will notify Dietrich and his men, and the eldar farseer. We will begin shipping the civilians north in the last armaments convoy, while we still hold the road.’ He paused. ‘Only those who can fight. We cannot take them all.’

‘That is defeat,’ Malchai said.

‘That is reality, brother. Better to do it now by our own choice, than be forced into it in the midst of another assault. Fornix, you will see to it. Take direct command of the men still fighting down there and bring them north, across the spaceport lines.’

Fornix nodded. Even he could find nothing to say.

‘Let us go to our duties, brothers,’ Kerne said. ‘And may our mighty father look down upon us with favour. There is a lot to do before the sun rises.’

‘By the Throne,’ Brother Malchai said heavily.

Even on Ras Hanem, even now, the fighting had its lulls and pauses, as fleeting as the gaps between raindrops in a storm. It was in one of these that Kerne finally found his way back to the eldar farseer.

She was just to the rear of her warriors, and the xenos before her had seen off a probe by the Punisher armoured fighters who might once conceivably have been Adeptus Astartes. There were eldar dead lying around, and one of their kind was gathering the spirit stones from their armour. The others were seeing to their weapons, making repairs to the light wargear they wore, and as they did so, they were singing a low threnody, a lament for their fallen comrades.

Male and female voices joined together, and Te Mirah stood and watched them, raising one slender hand as though she were receiving a salute, or conducting the song. She did not turn around as Kerne approached, but lowered her arm.

‘Ainoc is dead,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Kerne told her.

She bent her head. ‘I hope he was fighting, at the end. He would have wanted to leave this world with a blade in his hand.’

Kerne said nothing. Fornix had not elaborated on the warlock’s death, and he had not thought to ask.

‘But he did not die in vain, did he, captain?’

Te Mirah turned around at last. She lifted her helm so he could see the pale blur of her long, severely beautiful face in the night.

‘You have it with you.’

‘My brothers brought it up. Only two of them survived. It was guarded.’

Te Mirah was breathing quickly, though her face was quite composed.

‘None of your kind has ever seen such a precious treasure before, much less held it. You have in your hands the fate of a great number of my people, captain. And yet you come here alone, holding it. To threaten me?’ She was breathing fast now, and her eyes had begun to glow. About her feet, a cold wind began to circle and stir up the dust.

‘Brother Laufey,’ Kerne said.

From the ruins, a voice said: ‘Here, captain.’

‘Do not fire unless I give you an express command, brother.’

‘Acknowledged.’

Te Mirah scanned the surrounding ruins. Behind her, the other eldar warriors rose to their feet and cocked their weapons, the thin shriek of the shurikens quite different from the solid sound of bolter mechanisms.

Three red dots appeared on the farseer’s torso, and another travelled up her body to rest on her forehead.

‘I am not alone,’ Jonah Kerne said.

‘You had best kill me quick, mon-keigh,’ Te Mirah shrilled.

‘I am not here to kill you.’

The light in her eyes steadied. She held up a hand, and the warriors behind her went very still, the shuriken catapults poised to fire.

‘I gave you my word,’ Jonah Kerne said in the same low, calm voice. ‘I mean to keep it.’

He stepped forward and held out the cloth-wrapped bundle he carried to the eldar woman.

She gasped, and over her face a whole gamut of emotions came and went, flitting like leaves before a wind. Then she gently reached out with both hands, and took the Infinity Circuit from the towering Space Marine.

The glow in it intensified, beaming through the fabric which enwrapped it. Te Mirah looked down upon the artefact, and from her mouth there came something which might have been a sob, bitten back instantly. Her voice when she spoke was thick and raw.

‘You give it to me freely, you, one of the fanatics we have despised and feared for tens of thousands of your years. It is… inexplicable.’

‘Some of my brethren think so also,’ Kerne said dryly.

‘Why?’ she asked, baffled. ‘Those I sent to retrieve it are all dead. Your own people brought it to the surface – you could have kept it. By your beliefs you should keep it.’

‘I gave my word,’ Kerne repeated simply.

The farseer studied Kerne as though seeing him for the first time. ‘You are not like the others of your kind, Adeptus Astartes. There is a wisdom in you that is uncommon in your species. But I still do not understand why you do this.’

Kerne frowned. ‘That thing you hold, it encompasses the memories, the souls of an entire world.’ He raised a hand to the ruined city which surrounded him.

‘Tens of millions once dwelled here, my people and yours, and now they are nearly all dead – at the hands of the same enemy. It occurred to me that if I had this relic of yours destroyed, then I would be doing that enemy’s work for him. Chaos wishes to see an end to both our races. I will not help those Ruinous Powers to their goal.’

‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend,’ Te Mirah said with a slight smile.

‘I would not go quite that far, xenos. You probably meant to deceive and betray us at some point – it is in your nature. But now you do not have to, and my brothers do not have to fight your kind as well as the Great Enemy which surrounds us.’

‘I could just leave, now, with all my folk, and sail away from this system.’

‘Yes, you could.’

‘Are you actually telling me you have faith in the eldar, captain?’

‘No. But I sense in you a kind of honour.’

‘Perhaps we are both singular examples of our peoples,’ Te Mirah said.

‘Perhaps. In any case, I have kept my word. What will you do now?’

The farseer stroked the bundle she held as though it were a dear child lately recovered. She turned and spoke in her own tongue to the eldar behind her, and handed it to one of them, a leader of his kind judging by the elaborate horns and antlers upon his helm.

‘The Circuit will be sent off-world to my ship at once,’ she said. ‘As for myself, I and my kind will remain here. You have made me curious, captain. I think I will have to reappraise your people. I will stay here, and see if I cannot help you hold back the tide of destruction which is enveloping them – for a while at least.’

They stood looking at one another. ‘Stand down, Brother Laufey,’ Kerne said at last. ‘I wish to inform our allies of tonight’s plans.’

The red laser-dots winked out. The Adeptus Astartes captain and the eldar farseer drew closer, and began to confer. They planned together how to defend the last corner of a ruined world, and how to keep at least one part of it free of the encroaching darkness.