He let the blade drop to the floor with a clang and walked to the cell door. As it opened he looked back at Qruze and pointed at the parchment and at the corpse on the floor.

‘Burn it,’ said Rogal Dorn. ‘Burn it all.’

REBIRTH

Chris Wraight

I HAVE NO idea how long I’ve been out. I should have; my enhanced memory and catalepsean function should have retained some trace, but everything is blank.

Presumably, that is part of the process. They want to induce doubt, to make me question whether I am up to this. If that is so, then they have succeeded. My total lack of recall preys on my mind. I do not like not knowing.It feels, certainly, like I’ve been ignorant of far too many facts for far too long.

But I am alive, and my hearts beat. That is something. Since coming round, I have had several minutes to reflect on my situation. That is useful too, though also no doubt part of some planned sequence.

I run down the basics, the physical aspects of my predicament. It helps, to force my mind into something mechanical. As I do so, I feel a degree of mental alertness returning.

I am in a chair. I am naked. My wrists, ankles, neck and chest are shackled with iron bands.

No, not iron – I’d be able to break that. Something similarly blunt and uncomfortable.

There is almost no light. I can make out the outline of my limbs dimly, but little else. My breathing is light, and there is an old pain behind my rib-fused chest. My secondary heart is still beating, indicating that I am recovering from some extensive trauma or exertion. I can feel no major wounds on my body, though there are many hundreds of bruises and abrasions, consistent with having been in action recently.

I have no mind-sight. I sense no souls nearby. For the first time since ascending into the ranks of the Legion, I remember what it is like to be alone with my own thoughts. At first, this is strangely comforting, like stumbling across a memento of a happy childhood.

But I do not take comfort for long, since my non-psychic senses are not as truncated. As my body adjusts and my faculties return, I realise that I am not alone. There is someone in the chamber with me, invisible in the dark. I cannot see him, but I can smell him and hear him. There is blood on his hands, and it makes the air of this confined chamber sharp and unsavoury. He breathes in ragged, shuddering draughts, like a panting animal held briefly at bay.

For the moment, that is all I sense. We sit in silence for a while longer, and I try to recall the events leading up to this moment. They come back to me only slowly, and in disconnected parts.

It takes a long time for him to speak. When he does, the voice takes me by surprise.

It is magnificent. There is tightly-contained savagery in that voice, a throat-wet growl that slips round the words and underpins each of them with a precise degree of mordant threat. I suspect this is no charade to make me uneasy, but simply the way my interrogator talks.

So the process begins the way these things always begin, the way a million interrogations have started since the dawn of organised violence.

‘Tell me your name and company designation,’ he says.

And for a moment, for a terrible moment, I realise that I cannot remember.

THE G EOMETRICPULLED into high orbit, running silent, hull-lights extinguished. Two hundred kilometres down, the planet was almost as dark. It was void-black, laced with cracks of angry red where magma, or maybe surface fires, scored the crust.

Brother-Captain Menes Kalliston stood on the bridge of the destroyer and watched the approach through the realspace viewers. He was wearing battle-plate, but his head was bare. His dark eyes stayed fixed on the curve of the planet, now filling most of the plexiglass screens above him. His blunt, severe features were characteristically static. A slender patrician nose bisected rough-cut cheekbones. His flesh looked dry, like old parchment, and his burnt-umber hair was cropped close to the scalp. A single tattoo marked his right temple, an owl-archetype, symbol of the Athanaean cult discipline.

His armour was a deep, glossy red. His shoulder-guards were decorated in white and gold, picking out the icons and numerals of the Fourth Fellowship of the XV Legion Astartes, the Thousand Sons.

As he stood in contemplation, another figure came to join him. The new arrival had a stockier, shorter, more vigorous frame, and his features were closer to the Space Marine median – bull-necked, angular jaw, taut flesh over heavy bones. He might have been younger than the first, but the vagaries of gene-conditioning always made it so hard to tell.

‘No enemy signals?’ asked Kalliston, not turning.

‘None,’ confirmed Brother-Sergeant Revuel Arvida.

‘And you sense nothing?’

Arvida, who was Corvidae, gave a rueful smile.

‘It’s not as easy as it used to be.’

Kalliston nodded.

‘No. That it isn’t.’

To Kalliston’s left, a control column blinked with several runes. A hololith emerged above it, a rotating sphere marked with precogitated atmospheric descent routes.

‘Landers are prepared, captain,’ said Arvida. ‘We can do this whenever you want.’

‘And you’re still not sure we should.’

‘You know I’m not.’

Only then did Kalliston turn from the viewers and look his subordinate in the eye.

‘I’ll need you down there,’ he said. ‘I don’t care what the augur readings say, it’ll be dangerous. So, if your hearts aren’t in this, tell me now.’

Arvida returned the gaze steadily, the ghost of a smile on his lips.

‘So I get to choose which missions I go on?’

‘I won’t force you to come on this one.’

Arvida shook his head.

‘That’s not how it works. You’ll go, and I’ll follow, as will the rest of the squad. You’ve convinced them, at any rate.’

‘They needed little convincing.’

‘There are other mysteries to solve, and I don’t see how coming here helps with those.’

Kalliston let a flicker of exasperation escape from the edges of his severe expression.

‘We have to start somewhere.’

‘I know. And, like I said, if you’re sure about this, then I’ll be with you. Just be sure.’

Kalliston looked back up at the vision in the realspace viewers. The planet had a deathly aura to it, one that would have been evident even to the most warp-blind of mortals. The gaps between the rivers of fire were a deep sable, like shafts opening out onto nothingness. Something vast and terrible had happened there, and the residues of it were still echoing.

‘I am sure, brother,’ he said, and his voice was firm. ‘We were preserved for a reason, and that gives us responsibilities. We’ll make planetfall on the night-side of the terminator.’

His dark eyes narrowed, scrutinising the close view of the planet’s hemisphere. It looked like he was trying to conjure up a vision of something long gone, something destroyed beyond recovery.

‘Less than six months since we were ordered to leave,’ he said, talking to himself now. ‘Throne, Prospero has changed.’

‘MENES KALLISTON, CAPTAIN, Fourth Fellowship, Thousand Sons.’

I remember that after a few moments, and the words come quickly to my parched lips. That is what one is meant to say, I believe – name, rank and serial number.

Perhaps I should resist saying more, though I feel strangely reluctant to stay silent. They may have injected loquazine into my bloodstream, but I doubt it. I see no reason not to talk for a while. After all, I have no idea why I’m here, or what’s going on, or how long I will be alive.

‘What are you doing on Prospero?’ he asks.

‘I could ask you the same thing.’

‘You could. And I could kill you.’

I think he wants to kill me. There’s something in the voice, some timbre of eagerness, that gives it away. He’s holding himself back. He’s a Space Marine, I guess. There’s very little else like that voice, rolling up from those enhanced lungs and that muscle-slabbed gullet and that great barrel-chest like water from a deep mill.