Rob Sanders: Legion of the Damned

version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> sf_action sf_epic Rob Sanders Legion of the Damned

It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

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The deafening silence of carnage after the fact.

An ocean of bolt-riddled bodies, as far as the eye could see. Corpse crests and blasted troughs, black with blood and swarming with flesh lice. Plunging breakers of ragged remains and shattered armour, marking the abrupt end of some maniacal charge. The trampled mulch of the fallen: deviants, the daemon-possessed and warriors in desecrated plate. Hideous faces of indescribable rage. A battle-smear of wretched flesh, hammered out of its misery by some merciful trajectory. The Emperor himself, it seemed, guiding the path of each blessed bolt and blast.

Approbator Vaskellen Quast of the Ordo Obsoletus pulled his scented neckerchief down and brought the grille of the meme-vox to his lips. ‘Twenty-seven fifty-eight hours, Central Planetary Time. Certus-Minor – Adeptus Ministorum cemetery world.’ The stench of gore steaming in the morning heat seared his nostrils, prompting the young acolyte to snort, hock and spit. ‘Praga subsector, Segmentum Obscurus.’

Quast clambered carefully across a ridge of corrupt forms. His advance was frustrated by more than just bodies. Beneath the carpet of bone-jutting butchery lay the cemetery world surface: a crowded expanse of ornate tombstones, mausolea and funerary sculpture. Every square metre of dirt was devoted to the art of burial and the infrastructure that served that hallowed purpose. Space on Certus-Minor existed at a premium, with grave plots and baroque memorial markers almost built one on top of another. This created a landscape of cold, crafted stone. A graveyard on a planetary scale.

The approbator could see little of the surface from where he was standing, covered as it was with the splattered remains of those who had never reached the solace of an Imperial grave, and those who didn’t deserve one. Knee-deep in the Chaotics and carnage, Quast felt tense with overwhelming disgust. It was more than just the stench and warming rot. He felt that his very soul was in danger just standing in the presence of the unhallowed dead – that the corrupting influence of the Ruinous Powers was still in evidence in the mutilated remains and that it was aware of his God-Emperor-fearing footsteps.

Behind the acolyte hovered a Valkyrie carrier, as black as a silhouette against the pearly cloud cover of the cemetery world sky and marked only with the sinister insignia of the Ordo Obsoletus. About him stalked Inquisitorial storm troopers from the 52nd Ranger Pelluciad, all field masks, humming weaponry and camo-carapace.

‘Ruling pontifex and planetary governor,’ Quast continued, ‘one Erasmus Oliphant. Tithe grade: Solutio Tertius. Population at last Administratum census estimated at one million Imperial souls. Certus-Minor, revised estimates, post-atrocities: zero.’

The Cholercaust had built its fearful reputation on such barbaric efficiency. The Blood God’s servants couldn’t help themselves. Survivors weren’t a strategic consideration. The Slayer cared little for the tales of victims-in-waiting and what others might do with such information. Its tactics were always the same: uncompromising, overwhelming and savage. Where hearts beat with the defiance of life, the goremongers raged, honouring only the razored edge and baptising worlds in torrents of blood.

‘Hadria, Dregeddon IV, L’Orient, Callistus Mundi, Port Koronach, among a hundred other worlds, all similarly butchered. All victims of the Cholercaust Blood Crusade. All planets on the path of the Keeler Comet.’

Quast’s vox-bead chirped. ‘Proceed.’

‘Sir, the Providence reports that a large vessel has just translated in-system.’

‘Markings and registration?’

‘Still collating that information, sir. I can tell you that it has achieved high orbit.’

‘Probably a Ministorum heavy transport, bringing in penitents and frater labour from Bona Phidia. Get a visual. Keep me informed. Quast out.’

The approbator let his eyes linger on the charred mountain of rubble that was Obsequa City. The smouldering ruins before Quast had been a beautiful, baroque metrapol. A vision of towers, steeples and spires. Stained-glass and rockrete, dark with age, thrusting for the heavens with reverent majesty. With nearly every square metre of dirt on Certus-Minor devoted to the dead, even the city was considered an extravagance. Like a tiny, ecclesiastical hive, Obsequa City comprised bethels, basilicas and cathedrals that were built tall and tight. The narrow alleys and passages were steep and cobbled, leading up to the crowning monument – the heart of the city in both a physical and spiritual sense – the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum.

The huge dome of the vault had once dominated the city skyline. Now it was a blasted remnant. A demolished edifice, collapsed in on itself – open and exposed to the elements. It had originally been built to honour and house the bones of Umberto II – Ecclesiarch, High Lord of Terra and prosecuter of innumerable wars of faith. Under Umberto, the Ecclesiarchy’s influence across the galaxy grew and the forces of darkness in and around the Eye of Terror made precious little progress. With Umberto’s leadership, the common faithful of the Imperium rose up and took the fight back to the Ruinous Powers, standing shoulder to shoulder with their brothers and sisters in the Imperial Guard and the Emperor’s Angels of Death. Ancient Terran scholars ascribed the near two thousand years of uneasy peace between the Eleventh Black Crusade and the Gothic War largely to the legacy of Umberto’s efforts in the segmentum.