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"+++"Two
Debris Field, Agripinaa Sector
There was silence aboard the Sons of Malice cruiser, the Bronze Minos.
The figures in the bridge wore archaic power armour of black and white quarters, with trims of brass spikes. They were still as shadows as they stood waiting, and at last a figure moved on the bridge. No one stirred as the newcomer spoke in a low hiss of fangs. ‘Agitor.’
‘Yes, Junger.’
‘We have identified the ships.’
There was a pause before the Agitor nodded. ‘Speak.’
‘The ships are from Cadia.’ The words had a heavy import, and Junger let them fall before saying any more.
The Agitor smiled. ‘Abaddon’s net was not as tight as he promised us.’
‘No, lord. These are Cadians.’
The Agitor paused. He did not turn from the viewscreen and spoke in a whisper. ‘So, Junger. This is all that remains of Cadia’s proud armies – a handful of hulks?’
‘Yes, Agitor.’
This time the Agitor gave a low chuckle. The sudden noise surprised some of the other figures standing there. ‘So. The chance has been given to us to destroy the Sons of Cadia. How could I let this moment pass? When we wipe them out, will they understand the delightful irony of this moment?’
‘I doubt it. What do they know? They learn nothing that is true. They will have no idea about us. About the past. About the blood debt they owe us.’
‘They won’t, will they? It’s almost sad. Perhaps we should let them know.’
Junger frowned. ‘They would not believe it. We did not remember. Until our eyes were opened.’
The Agitor mused on this.
‘We should just kill them,’ Junger said.
The Agitor nodded. ‘You are right.’
The name of the Sons of Malice Chapter had long since been erased from Imperial records, but they had been loyal once. They were one of the twenty Chapters known as the Astartes Praeses, Chapters devoted to keeping the Cadian Gate secure.
For centuries they had waged a tough and relentless war against the heretics and daemons of the Eye of Terror. The ferocious manner of war-making became a byword for the ruthless and relentless punishment of treachery and heresy, and they prided themselves on the cost they inflicted upon their foes, taking recruits from their home world, Scelus, where tattooed tribes indulged in cannibalism.
It was after millennia of devoted battle that an Imperial Inquisitor, Solomon Pietas, had witnessed the manner of their flesh-eating ceremonies.
Instinct told him that the Chapter had already fallen, and he had brought in a strike attack of Sisters of our Martyred Lady and five regiments of Imperial Guard. The combined force caught the Sons of Malice in one of their eleven-year rites when their guard was down. They attacked the Chapter with melta and fire and fury.
The attack failed utterly. Solomon Pietas was captured and sacrificed in the Chapter’s inner chambers, and as word arrived at the High Lords of Terra, the Sons of Malice were offered the chance to repair their sins with a fifty-year crusade.
The Chapter Master had refused. He would accept neither censure nor punishment. But he was a warrior with his own sense of honour. The Imperial envoy was allowed to depart unscathed, the low hiss of the Chapter Master’s defiance ringing in his ears.
‘We have done nothing wrong,’ he had told him. ‘We shall not do penance to any.’
It was a misconception that battles were won by strength, or power, or ferocity.
It was certainly something that the Chapter Master of the Sons of Malice believed. Typical of a gene-enhanced member of the Adeptus Astartes. But students of Imperial history knew that martial strength did not decide the victors.
In ancient times a snowstorm or inclement weather might have tilted the balance of battle. The victors were often decided by small, incidental facts. And in the case of the struggle between Inquisitor Solomon Pietas and the Sons of Malice, it was the inquisitor’s message that arrived at Holy Terra first.
The Sons of Malice assumed that their long history of service to the Imperium would vindicate them of charges that they considered baseless.
But the inquisitor had sent urgent and skewed accounts to the High Lords of Terra, and with trouble so close to the Cadian Gate, the panicked response of the Imperium was swift and brutal and sudden. An extermination fleet arrived in the Scelus System within months.
They would not listen to any of the Sons of Malice’s brief messages. It was war.
The Sons of Malice escaped aboard their battle-barge, the Labyrinth, but they left their home world of feral tribesmen undefended, and it was on the feral world that the forces of Cadia descended, scouring the planet of human life in a terrible campaign of fire and murder.
The Chapter had been forced into the Eye of Terror. There, they had fought both the heretics and the Imperium, until at last Abaddon had brought them round to his cause. Despite centuries of heresy, the injustice of their treatment had burned within them. After centuries of fighting and struggle, they had, through stupidity and alarm, been driven into the arms of the enemy whom they had been created to defeat.
The Chapter had chafed for centuries, and it seemed now they had been given a chance to punish the Cadians for the role they had played in their ancient tragedy.
All this was known to the warriors who stood on that bridge.
Agitor Kanath closed his eyes and said a silent prayer of thanks to the power of lawlessness and violence. ‘Fate is kind to those who hate,’ the Agitor said. ‘They destroyed the tribes who were our mother and father. We shall destroy them and eat their souls.’
But it was not just the Sons of Malice who had heard the rumours. All across the Agripinaa Sector, rumour flew. From the vapour world of Yaymar to the subterranean hives of Narsine, heretical warbands of Traitor Astartes gathered like carrion, determined to take their share of whatever glory was on offer.
Word travelled quickly through the warp. Daemons brought their mortal worshippers into the secret, and across the whole sector of what had once been Imperial space – the agri world of Albitern, the island hives of Tabor, the grox-raising plains of Sarlax, from Lelithar, the penal worlds of Bar-el and from proud Malin’s Reach – shards of the Black Legion began to gather like vultures who see an old and dying beast fall and struggle to rise.
