The Killing Ground by Graham McNeill

  At least that was what Daron Nisato told himself before he went to sleep each night.

  'Stay alert,' ordered Nisato, 'and if I'm not out in ten minutes, come in and get me.'

  'Understood, sir.'

  A squad of five enforcers sat in the baking confines of the Chimera, armed and armoured for combat, but Nisato did not think he would need them. Mesira was a lonely, afflicted woman, but she wasn't dangerous. When he had seen her at the palace, he had seen the desperation etched into her face and although it fell somewhat beyond his remit of upholding the law to check on her like this, he felt he owed her a duty of care.

  For, if not him, then who?

  Nisato rapped his gauntlet against her door, hearing the empty echoes of it up the stairs and feeling the give in it that told him it wasn't locked. He pushed the door open, not liking the stale, abandoned air he felt from the dwelling. Dozens could live in a place like this, but fear of Mesira's abilities had kept her isolated, for who wanted to live with a witch?

  His hand went to his bolt pistol as he slid through the door, keeping his steps as light as he was able. Inside the door was a narrow vestibule with boarded up doors and a staircase that led up to a landing. Weak light filtered down the stairs from a skylight above and dust motes spun in the air where his opening of the door had disturbed them.

  'Mesira?' he called, deciding that there was no need for stealth after having knocked. 'Are you in here?'

  There was no answer. Nisato drew his pistol, his instinct for trouble warning him that all was not right. Carefully, knowing that Mesira lived on the first floor, Nisato climbed the stairs, keeping his pistol trained on the space above him. Keeping his breathing even, he eased onto the landing, seeing an open door along a wooden floored corridor with flakboard laid along its length in lieu of carpet or tiles. The reek of khat leaves was strong, telling him that this was Mesira's home; many psychics turned to narcotics to allow them to sleep without dreaming.

  Checking both ways along the corridor, Nisato called Mesira's name once more, again receiving no response. He swept along the corridor until he reached the door and pressed himself against the wall beside it. Reaching up, Nisato snapped his helmet's visor down and reached up to amplify the aural gain on its auto-senses.

  Amid the crackling static, he listened for the tread of footsteps, the rasp of frightened breath or the sound of metal as a pistol was cocked. Nisato remained motionless for several minutes until he was sure there was no immediate threat.

  Taking a deep breath, he spun around and kicked the door inwards, moving swiftly inside, twisting this way and that to cover his blind spots and check the dead zones where an assailant might be lurking.

  With quick, professional skill, Nisato moved from room to room, seeing no evidence of a struggle or any sign of Mesira.

  He did, however, see plenty of evidence of a lost, desperate soul in need of a friend. Rumpled, dirty sheets covered a threadbare mattress in the corner of one room. Empty bottles of raquir lay scattered everywhere and the air reeked of khat leaves. Food wrappers lay where they had been thrown and Daron Nisato felt a terrible regret at not reaching out to Mesira.

  Something told him that, as was often the case, regret only came when it was too late to do something about it. The place was empty and he lowered his pistol, saddened at the waste of a life that was laid out before him.

  Nisato moved into the main room and walked over to the grimy window that looked out over the city of Barbadus. Sprawling and ugly, it simmered in the heat of the day, fumes and smudges of smoke staining the sky from the distant manufactories. Enforcing Imperial Law in a place like this wasn't how Daron Nisato had imagined ending his career with the Achaman Falcatas, but then life very rarely took you down the paths you imagined when you were young.

  He remembered leaving the Schola Progenium on Ophelia VII, thinking of the plum assignments that would be his and the great things he would achieve in the service of the Emperor. For a time, it had been as he'd imagined. His service in the Falcatas had been honourable and he was, if not liked, (what commissar was ever really liked?) respected.

  Then Colonel Landon, Old Serenity the men called him, had been killed at Koreda Gorge along with his senior officers and Leto Barbaden had assumed command. Nisato had met Barbaden only once before then and had not been impressed. The man was a quartermaster and regimental logistician, a man who dealt with absolutes and to whom men were simply numbers in a ledger.

  Nisato shook off such thoughts, not liking where they were leading, and turned to face the room, seeing scattered papers on a leaning desk, a dark pile of clothing and a rumpled greatcoat.

  Even as he took in the details, his attention snapped towards the wall opposite the window, where five words had been daubed in what he knew instantly was blood.

  Help me... I was there.

  Below that was a gleaming medal depicting a screaming eagle.

  THEY WERE BEAUTIFUL.

  Uriel had scarce seen anything that had filled him with such a welcome sense of return. Hidden at the back of the Gallery of Antiquities, they stood in serried ranks and gleamed in the dim light. The blue and white paint of their elongated helmet muzzles was scraped and every breastplate was dented or cracked from long ago impacts.

  Under normal circumstances, they would be considered horrifically damaged or, at the very least, grossly neglected, but to Uriel's eyes, these suits of armour were the most perfect things he had ever seen.

  There were nineteen of them, each painted in quartered blue and white, the left shoulder guard a studded auto-reactive plate, the right stamped with a golden ''U'' over a pair of white wings. In each fist was clutched a bolter, some damaged, some gleaming as though fresh from the armoury.

  'You recognise the Chapter symbol?' asked Uriel.

  Pasanius nodded. 'The Sons of Guilliman,' he whispered, 'a founding of the thirty-third millennium. Unbelievable.'

  'I know,' said Uriel, reaching to run a hand over the eagle emblazoned upon the nearest suit's breastplate. 'Mk VI, Corvus-pattern power armour.'

  Uriel turned to Lukas Urbican, and the curator took a step back as he saw the anger in his face. 'How did this armour come to be here? How did the Falcatas come to be in possession of Astartes power armour? These should have been returned to their Chapter!'

  'Oh no!' said Urbican quickly. 'These aren't battle trophies or spoils of war. These suits of armour were here in the gallery when I took on its upkeep, I assure you.'

  Uriel saw the truth in the curator's fear and raised his hands in apology. 'I am sorry, I should have thought before I spoke, but to see Astartes armour paraded by mortals like this is... unusual. No Chapter would willingly leave such a precious legacy of their history behind.'

  'I understand,' said Urbican, but Uriel saw that he did not and the curator was still shaken by his earlier anger. Uriel took a deep breath and said, 'Allow me to explain, Lukas. To a Space Marine, his armour is more than just plates of ceramite and fibre-bundle muscles, more than simply what shields him from the bullets and blades of his enemies. The armour becomes part of the warrior who dons it. Heroes have fought the enemies of mankind wearing this armour and upon their death, it is repaired and given to another warrior to fight in the name of the Emperor. Each warrior strives to be worthy of the hero before him and earn his own legend to pass on.'

  'I think I understand, Uriel,' said Urbican, moving forward to place his hand on the scarred vambrace. 'You're saying that it is more than just a functional piece of battle gear, that there's living history in every plate. Legends are carved in every scar upon its surface and a life of battle encapsulated in its very existence. Yes, I see that now.'

  'So how did they come to be here?' asked Uriel again.

  'Well, as I said, you are not the first Astartes to come to this world,' said Urbican, 'although I believe it was many centuries before the Falcatas arrived that these warriors fought here.'

  'Who were they fighting?'

  'Ah, well, there things te
nd to get a bit hazy. The record keepers of Salinas were somewhat vague on that account, although there are veiled references to great beasts without skin, red-fleshed hounds that could swallow a man whole, and armoured warriors who could bend the very nature of reality. All lurid stuff, to be sure, and no doubt magnified by the writer, but whatever they were they were serious enough to warrant the attentions of Space Marines.'

  Uriel recognised warriors of the Ruinous Powers from Urbican's description and shared an uneasy glance with Pasanius at the mention of great beasts without skin as the curator continued with his tale. Uriel had not forgotten that the Unfleshed still roamed the hills around Khaturian and knew he could not afford to leave them alone for much longer.

  'There was talk of a great battle near an abandoned city in the foothills of the northern mountains.'

  'I think we know that city,' said Pasanius. 'Khaturian isn't it?'

  'Ah, yes, I believe that was its name,' said Urbican. 'Anyway, these Sons of Guilliman, as you call them, fought the enemy, but were, unfortunately, wiped out.'

  'So where are the rest of the suits of armour?' asked Uriel.

  'These are the only ones we have. The texts of the time talk of other Astartes coming to Salinas in the aftermath of the battle, warriors who were able to defeat these beasts.'

  'Do your texts say who these warriors were?'

  'No, although they were described as ''giants in silver armour who smote the vile foe with lightning and faith''. Apparently, they defeated the enemy and left immediately after the victory was won. I have always presumed they took whatever armour the Sons of Guilliman left behind.'

  'Then why did they not take these?'

  'According to the archive labels, they were discovered buried in the ruins of a collapsed building in Khaturian many decades later, by servitors hauling stone to build the new temple by all accounts. I suppose these silver giants must have missed them when they left.'

  'What of the bones?' asked Pasanius. 'The warriors who wore this armour.'

  'I'm sorry, I don't know. There was no mention of bones, just the armour.'

  Uriel turned back to the silent warriors and walked along the line of Mk VI plate, now knowing that brother Space Marines had died fighting the great enemy of mankind on this world in ages past. The dim light of the gallery seemed to shine in the depths of the eye lenses of the helmets, as though some flickering ember of the warriors who had worn this armour remained within.

  'They were waiting,' said Uriel, and no sooner had he spoken the words than he felt the Tightness of them on a deep, instinctual level.

  'Waiting for what?' asked Pasanius.

  'For someone to find them and reawaken their glory,' said Uriel, the words leaping unbidden to his lips, as though spoken by another, 'to fight their enemies once more, and to bring them home.'

  He stopped before a suit that had been punctured through the gorget by some unknown weapon, the plates, seals and inner linings of the armour buckled inwards. Dark stains striated the inner surfaces and, although centuries old, Uriel could smell the ancient hero's blood.

  As he stared at the blood, Uriel felt the kinship he shared with this warrior on a level he could not articulate. This was a legacy of heroism that stretched back thousands of years, and even over the aeons of time and distance that separated them Uriel knew that this armour had not just been waiting: it had been waiting for him.

  NO WORD WAS forthcoming from Governor Barbaden regarding the possibility of a medicae examining Pasanius's arm, so Uriel spent the next two days working on his suit of armour, working with craftsmen from the palace forges to restore it to functionality.

  Pasanius had been reunited with his own armour, and soon Uriel no longer thought of this armour as belonging to another warrior.

  It was his, though he knew that it would be his for only a limited time.

  The armour belonged to the Sons of Guilliman and it would dishonour their warriors to wear it for any longer than was necessary. After a thorough inspection, it was clear that the damage was largely superficial, but with broken parts replaced with components from other suits, it was not long before Uriel stood before a fully restored suit of Mk VI plate.

  Palace artificers were already attempting to modify the cable heads of their generators in an attempt to recharge the internal power of the armour, and they confidently predicted that they would have the armour fully functional within the day.

  In the meantime, Uriel and Pasanius explored the Gallery of Antiquities with Curator Urbican. The gallery held many fascinating treasures, although none was as magnificent as the nineteen suits of Corvus-pattern power armour they had discovered on their first visit.

  Urbican was a genial host and a garrulous orator, endlessly pleased to have someone to whom he could hold forth on the history of the Falcatas and the world they had conquered.

  On the eastern edge of the Paragonus sub-sector, a lynchpin of Imperial defences of the coreward approach to Segmentum Solar, the Salinas system was one of a dozen that had felt the wrath of an Imperial Crusade some thirty-five years ago. The core worlds of the sub-sector had fallen prey to agents of the Archenemy, and the forces of Warlord Crozus Regaur had begun to swallow up the outlying systems, one by one.

  Before the enemy forces had gained an unbreakable hold on the sub-sector, the Imperium had retaliated, raising regiments from the oudying systems to fight the threat. Such measures held the enemy in check, but had not the strength to dislodge him from the sub-sector, and thus regiments from beyond the immediate sphere of the conflict were dragged into it.

  The Falcatas had been one such regiment and had been tasked with cleansing the outer systems of taint. For the first planets of the Salinas system, it had already been too late, their governors overthrown and their populace in thrall to the enemy.

  Along with a dozen other regiments and a demi-legion of titans from the Legio Destructor, the Falcatas had fought for two decades upon the blasted surfaces of these planets to drive Regaur's forces off-world. Urbican's voice choked as he told of the campaigns, and Uriel could only guess at the horrors and bloodshed he had seen in the liberation of the planets.

  Salinas had been the third world in the system and when the Achaman Falcatas had made planet-fall, they had come as an army of conquest. Despite pleas of loyalty to the God-Emperor from the populace, the battle-hardened veterans of the Guard, men and women who had waded through blood and the dead for most of their adult lives, were in no mood for half measures.

  The planetary governor had been executed and when his forces had taken arms in response to this, Barbaden had unleashed the full horror of the Falcatas' experiences of the last two decades.

  Men and women who had desperately tried to minimise civilian casualties in their first months as soldiers, soon cared little for the collateral damage caused by their assaults and the local PDF regiments had been obliterated within months of planet-fall.

  Although organised forces had been defeated, there remained a powerful core of resistance and, for many years, the Falcatas had fought a dedicated and utterly ruthless insurgent army named the Sons of Salinas that murdered Imperial soldiers and bombed their bases.

  All that had come to an end with the Khaturian Massacre.

  Uriel saw that Urbican was reluctant to speak of this, but gently pressed the old curator over the course of their second day of exploration of the galleries.

  'It was close to the fourth year after we arrived,' said Urbican. 'I wasn't there, of course, so I have this only secondhand. Well, the insurgents were getting out of hand and not a day went by without a bomb going off or a patrol being ambushed and slaughtered. We couldn't keep the peace; we were too few and our equipment was beginning to fail. Without re-supply and a corps of trained enginseers, tanks were getting a bit thin on the ground. We were getting weaker and they seemed to be getting stronger.'

  'So what did Barbaden do about it?' asked Pasanius. 'He was still colonel then wasn't he?'

  'He was,' agreed Urbica
n. 'He said that Khaturian was a base of operations of the Sons of Salinas and led the Screaming Eagles to surround it. Apparently, Barbaden gave the city fathers two hours to hand over the leader of the insurgents, a man named Sylvanus Thayer, or else he would order his men to attack.'

  'I'm guessing they didn't hand him over,' said Uriel.

  'They said they couldn't,' explained Urbican. 'They said he wasn't there, that he never had been. They begged Barbaden to call off his attack, but once Leto has his mind set on something, there's nothing anyone can do to dissuade him.'

  'So what happened?'

  Urbican shook his head. 'You must understand, Uriel, this is hard for me. The Killing Ground Massacre is not something I am proud to have associated with my regiment. All the good we did, all our honour and our glory died that day.'

  'I know this is hard for you,' said Uriel. 'You do not have to go on if you do not wish to.'

  'No,' said Urbican, 'some shames need to be told.'

  The curator drew a breath and smoothed down his robes before he continued. 'Well, the deadline for the people of Khaturian to hand over Thayer came and went, and for a time they thought that Barbaden's threat had been a bluff.'

  'But it wasn't, was it?'

  Urbican shook his head. 'No,' he said, 'it wasn't. Marauder bombers flew in over the mountains and dropped a dreadful amount of bombs. They blew the city apart. You could see the fires from Barbadus. It was as if the whole sky was aflame, a terrible sight, just terrible, and, well, after that reports are somewhat confused.'

  'Confused how?' asked Pasanius, scratching at his arm.

  'No one I've spoken to seems to be able to agree on exactly what happened next or even how it happened, but Colonel Barbaden ordered the Falcatas into the ruins of Khaturian and when they came out six hours later, there wasn't a single soul left alive in the city.'