Dan Abnett - Prospero Burns

I stepped towards him. My shots had killed him three or four times over. Blood from the rupturing torso wounds was streaming out of his corpse and spattering down through the deck grille into the darkness below. There was a huge, scorched puncture mark in the crown of his polished silver helmet as though a blacksmith had hammered a sooty augur through it. A steam of blood vapour wafted out of it from his cooked braincase.

I expected his expression to register something. Anger, perhaps, defiance, or full on hatred for me. I expected at least a rictus of agony, or even a look of sadness or dismay.

There was nothing. His face was slack. Not one hint of a vital emotion could be read. I have come to learn since that is the case with the faces of the dead. We find no messages or legacies there, no final communication. Life departs, and the face sinks. As the thread is cut, the tension goes, and only the untended ruin of absence remains.

*

The soldiers in red coats were the Prosperine Spireguard. Their noble and well-appointed regiments were the domestic defence forces. They were as finely drilled and effective as any elite division of the Imperial Army.

They looked too civilised and decorative to bear the brunt of the Wolves’ assault. They looked like men confounded by disruption to some formal colours ceremony. They looked as if they ought to be running away.

They did not run away. Let us agree on their courage and make it part of this account. They met the Sixth Astartes, the most efficient and ruthless killing machine in the entire arsenal of the Imperium, and did not give ground. They faced demented, barbarian giants that looked like feral caricatures of Astartes, and did not break. They had been ordered to defend Tizca, and they did not falter from that order.

And so they died. This is what happens when loyalty meets loyalty. Neither side was going to leave its grim and onerous duty undone, and so destruction of at least one was assured.

The Spireguard had ballistic armour woven into their distinctive red coats, but this could not withstand the mass-reactive devastation of bolter rounds. Some carried displacer fields or riot shields, but neither could cope with the withering ferocity of autocannons. Their silvered helms, some plumed, all alloyed from plasteel, were unable to block the slicing edge of axes or frostblades. Their gun-carriages and fighting vehicles were well plated and, in some cases, shielded, but all crumpled into mangled wreckage when struck by shoulder-launched missiles or conversion beamers, or burned like corpse-boxes on funeral pyres when caught by heavy flamers or melta effects. Jarl Ogvai, so several brothers attest, faced one gun-carriage down as if it was a saeneyti calf that he intended to wrestle to the ground and hog-tie. He gutted it with his power claws, shredding metal like scraps of foil. He split its casing wide open and then filled its interior with bolter fire that pulped the crew.

The devastation was heartbreaking. The ground, as we advanced, was littered with the tattered and disfigured dead. Blade weapons had sectioned some, heat weapons had blackened and fused others. The marks of bolter impacts had left huge wounds that looked like deep bitemark craters in radapples. For their part, the Spireguards’ lasguns and autoweapons barely scratched the marauding Rout. Minor injuries were taken. Only crew-served weapons and fighting vehicles offered any genuine hazard. Once the Sixth’s armoured support began their advance, clanking and clattering up from the steam-haze of the seafront zones where their heavy landers had come in, even that small hope was extinguished. Predators and Land Raiders, grey as granite and just as monolithic, crushed through buildings in the lower town, levelled structures and demolished towers. Their tracks cut new roads into the city’s streetplan, death roads of pulverised rubble. Their weapons selected and annihilated anything that crossed their range.

Dark shapes ran with them and around them, bounding along the new-made death roads into the fire of combat. They looked like wolves, or the shadows of wolves at least. I am not sure if they were real, or just the product of my imagination. The smoke was treacherous, and played many tricks.

*

I have never known my Rout brothers as savage as they were that day, nor have I ever known them so grim. There is a strange lightness to them in most times of war, an execution yard humour that allows them to bond and endure, and to laugh wyrd in the face. It is almost a glee, a relish, the eagerness of a duty well done. Even during the war with the Olamic Quietude I saw it: the caustic jokes, the barracking, the acid comments, the bleak, phlegmatic mindset.

But not on Prospero. The task was too dark, too thankless. Nothing could lighten the burden of what they were about, so they lost themselves in the fury of their actions. In some ways, this made Prospero’s punishment all the more extreme and unholy. Not only was no quarter offered, no quarter was even considered. Teeth were only bared in wet leopard-snarls of rage and hatred, not in menacing grins. The only words uttered were curses and condemnations. Golden, black-pinned eyes darkened with resolve and hardened with duress. Blood begat blood. Slaughter begat slaughter. Fire fed fire, and in that fuelled frenzy, a planet perished, a society bled out, and a wound was torn in the flank of the Imperium that would never heal.

The Rout of the Vlka Fenryka did everything that was asked of them, without question or dubiety. They were not in the wrong. They were the perfect warriors, the perfect executioners, precisely as they were engineered and bred to be. They were the Emperor’s sanction. This account, my account, absolves them of all blame and celebrates their trueheartedness.

It must also reflect one other thing. This account must reflect one other, secret thing. Hear it, and decide what must be done, even if what must be done is slit my throat and cut my thread so I can never recite this account again.

*

The day blurs in my memory. An experience of such extreme intensity, of such violence and unending cacophony, will always do that. Moments conflate, events knock into one another and overlap.

I remember I was in a park, or what was left of some public garden. All the vegetation was burning. There was a small shrine structure, which had taken an indirect hit and was bleeding smoke into the violet air. We had entered from the east, with crossfire coming at us. I had temporarily turned off my displacer field because it was beginning to lose its charge.

Then we met the Thousand Sons for the first time.

Something had made them hold back. It was not fear. Perhaps they could not stomach the heresy of a fight against their Astartes kin. Perhaps it was some kind of tactical ploy intended to achieve an advantage.

Perhaps it was restraint. As though accepting their punishment, they had not opposed our initial advance, but, like the Spireguard, they ultimately found they could not stand by and watch their city burn.

They were resplendent in gold-edged red, their helmets marked with the distinctive nasal crest of their Legion. Though in form and armour and stature they were equivalent to the warriors of the Sixth, they could not have been more different. They moved differently. The Wolves bounded and sprang; they seemed to glide and stride. The Wolves were head-down and fast moving; they were upright and measured. The Wolves were howling; they were silent.

I was standing in the middle of the burning lawns as the lines of rival Astartes first engaged, wild grey shapes hurling themselves at gold and red centurions. The noise was like a thunderclap. It was the slap of great masses crashing together, like the clashing rocks of myth, but there was a ringing peal to it as well. It sounded like the voice of the monstrous storms that sheer altitude sometimes detonated outside the high places of the Aett on Fenris.