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"на всякий случай"
I. Shiban
I remember much of what he said even now, but we all learned quicker from example than words. That was the way we were
made – we watched, and we acted.
We took delight in the speed we travelled. Perhaps we went too far, too fast, though I regret nothing. We were true to our nature,
and in the final test that was what saved us.
I do remember much about him from that time, back when our instincts were simpler. Some examples, some choice lessons,
stay with me even now, and I am better for it.
Of all the things he said, or was supposed to have said, only one truly struck at my heart. He said: ‘Laugh when you are killing.’
If we had needed an epigram, if anyone had ever asked what made us what we were, then I would have told them that.
No one ever asked. By the time anyone cared enough about us to seek us out, everything had already changed. We were suddenly
needed, but there was no time to think about why.
I followed his recommendation: when I killed, I laughed. I let the ice-wind pull my hair free, and I felt hot blood against my
skin. I ran far and strongly, daring my brothers to keep pace. I was like the berkut, the hunting eagle, free of the jesses, out on the
rising air, high up on the horizon.
That was what we were back then; that was what we all were. Minghan Kasurga – the Brotherhood of the Storm.
That was our ranking name, the one we used to differentiate ourselves.
In private, we were the laughing killers.
To the rest of the galaxy, we were still unknown.
I liked Chondax. The planet that had given its name to the whole stellar cluster suited our style of war, unlike magma-crusted
Phemus or jungle-choked Epihelikon. It had big, high skies, unbroken by cloud and pale green like rejke grass. We burned across
it in waves, up from the southern landing sites and out into the equatorial zone. Unlike any world I had known then or have
known since, it never changed – just a wasteland of white earth in every direction, glistening under the soft light of three distant
suns. You could push your hand into that earth and it would break open, crystalline like salt.
Nothing grew on Chondax. We lifted supplies down from orbit in bulk landers. When they were gone, when we were gone
again, the earth closed over the scorch-marks, smoothing them white.
It healed itself. Our presence there was light – we hunted, we killed, and then nothing remained. Even the prey – the greenskins,
which we call the hain, others the ork, or kine, or krork – failed to leave a mark. We had no idea how they supplied themselves.
We had destroyed the last of their crude space-vessels months earlier, stranding them on the surface. Every time we cleared them
out of their squalid nests, torching them and turning the earth to glass, the white dust came back.
I once led a squadron a long way south, covering three hundred kilometres before each major sunset, back to where we had
fought them in a brutal melee that had lasted seven days and stained the ground black with blood and carbon.
Nothing remained as we passed over the site, nothing but white.
I checked my armour’s locators. Jochi did not believe me; he said we had gone wrong. He was grinning, disappointed to find
nothing, hoping some of them might have survived and holed up again, ready for another fight.
I knew we were in the right place. I saw then that we were on a world that could not be harmed, a world that shrugged off our bloodstains
and our fury and made itself whole when we passed on.
That observation was the root of my liking for Chondax. I explained it to my brothers later as we sat under the stars, warming
our hands indulgently by firelight like our fathers had done on Chogoris. They agreed that Chondax was a good world, a world on
which good warfare could be conducted.
Jochi smiled tolerantly as I spoke, and Batu shook his scarred head, but I did not mind that. My brothers knew they had a poetical
character for a khan, but such things were not disdained by Chogorians as I had been told they were in other Legions.
Yesugei once told me that only poets could be true warriors. I did not know what he meant by that then. He might have been
referring to me particularly or he might not; one does not ask a zadyin arga to explain himself.
But I knew that when we were gone, our souls made hot and pure by killing, Chondax would not remember us. The fire we
warmed ourselves by, its fuel brought down by lifter like everything else, which in the old fashion we would not extinguish with
water nor kick over when dawn came, would leave no stain.
I found that reassuring.
We went north again. Always moving, always seeking. That was how we liked it; we would have quickly withered had we been
forced to stay locked down in the same place for long.
I took my brotherhood over the plains; five hundred of us, pristine in our crimson-rimmed ivory armour. Our jetbikes cut
swathes in the earth beneath us, churning it up and throwing out furrows behind. We rode them flamboyantly, knowing that none
could master their thunderous power like we could. When the third sun rose, making the empty sky glow, our inscribed pennants
flashed and our weapons glittered. We hurtled like earth-tied comets, strung out across the flat land in an arrowhead of silver,
whooping our joy and our glory and our purpose.
When the third sun rose on Chondax, there were no shadows. Everything came to our eyes in razor-edged blocks of colour. We
looked at one another and saw details we had never seen before. We saw the bloom in our leather-brown faces, and realised how old
we were, and how long we had been on campaign, and marvelled that we felt more savage and vivacious than we had as children.
On the seventh day when the suns were at their apex we saw orks on the horizon. They were heading north too, driving in long
columns of battered, clumsy armoured vehicles that sent gouts of soot into the air and gave away their position.
As soon as I saw them, my heart leapt. My muscles tensed, my eyes narrowed, my pulse quickened. I felt my fingers itch for the
feel of my guan dao glaive. The blessed weapon – two-metre metal shaft, single curved blade, a work of close combat genius –
had not drunk blood for many days; its spirit longed for the taste again, and I did not intend to disappoint it.
‘Prey!’ I roared, feeling the tight, cold air buffet my exposed face. I rose up in the saddle, letting my bike sway beneath me,
peering into the sun-glare of the horizon.
The greenskins did not turn to fight. They kept going, ploughing on in their smoke-choked convoy as fast as they could.
When he had first led us to Chondax, they would have fought us. They would have rushed at us, mob-handed, bellowing and
stampeding with spittle flying from their ragged mouths.
But no longer. We had broken their spirit. We had chased them across the face of the world, rooting them out, beating them
back, cutting them down. We knew that they were mustering somewhere, trying to summon up some kind of defence in numbers,
but even they must have sensed that the end was coming.
I did not hate them. In those days I did not know what it was to hate an enemy. I knew how strong, how clever, how resourceful
they were, and I respected that. In the earliest days they had killed many of my brothers. We had learned together, the two of
us, learning where our weaknesses lay, learning how to fight on a world that gave us nothing and was uncaring of our feuding
presence. They could travel fast when they wished to. Not as fast as us – nothing in creation was as fast as us – but they were wily,
creative, brave and fierce.
It may have been sentiment operating, but I do not believe they hated us either. They hated losing, and that gnawed at their spirit
and took the bite out of their blades, but they did not hate us.
Years earlier, on Ullanor, it had been different. We had nearly been undone by them. They had come at us in an endless, formless
green tide, overrunning everything, drunk on strength, unbounded in their magnificent, beautiful way of war.
In the end it was Horus who had turned them back. Horus and he had both fought there – I saw it myself, if only from a distance.
That was where things had finally turned, where the back of the beast had been broken. All that remained on Chondax were
the dregs; the last gritty remnants of an empire that had dared to challenge ours and had almost prevailed.
So I did not hate those that remained. I sometimes imagined how I would feel if we ever came up against a foe we could not
defeat, where nothing remained but to fall back, again and again, weakening further with every encounter, watching the lifeblood
slowly drain out of those around us as the noose tightened.
I hoped and believed that I would do as they did, and keep fighting.
I did not need to give my brothers orders – we had done the same thing many times. We powered to full speed, sweeping up on
either flank of the convoy in split formation.
It was a sight to make the blood race and the heart sing: five hundred gleaming jetbikes, thundering in arrowhead squadrons of
twenty, their engines deafening, their riders whooping. We spread out across the dazzling sand, superb in our livery of white, gold
and red, throwing up a storm of eddying dust in our wake.
Until then we had been cruising, letting our bikes sweep us into range. Now we were racing, our long hair snapping around our
shoulder guards, our blades flashing in the light of suns.
We homed in on the enemy vehicles – big, bulky carriers on half-tracks or mismatched wheel – swaying and rocking as the
greenskins pushed the wheezing engines hard. Streams of smoke roiled out of gaps in the armour plating. I saw individual orks
perched in gun-positions, swinging round to aim at us with patched-up rocket launchers and muzzle-blackened beam-weapons.
I saw their tusked mouths open – they were shouting something at us. All I heard was the rattling roar of the jetbikes, the blast
of the wind, the throaty growl of the xenos engines.
Our jetbikes had spinal-mounted heavy bolters, but we kept them quiet. None of us fired – we swept in close, swerving away
just before we came within range of the enemy guns, making our observations and plotting out our individual runs. We were
searching for the weak links, the places we would start.
Erdeni got his angles wrong and shot in too close. I turned in the saddle to see him take a rocket right in the chest, burning out
from a greenskin half-track and corkscrewing wildly before hitting him. He was hurled out of his saddle by the explosion. Before I
surged out of range, I saw him crash into the ground, rebounding and rolling as his heavy armour dragged him along.
I made a note then that, if he lived, Erdeni would pay penance.
Then we got to work.
Our bikes pounced, kicking in close, weaving and rolling through the hurricane of incoming fire. We opened up with our heavy
bolters, a fractured, explosive roar that briefly drowned the thunder of the engines. We cut into the convoy, searing past tottering
half-tracks, kindling devastation in our wake.
I was at the head of the arrow, gunning my mount hard, yelling out my savage battle-fury, diving clear of energy bolts and rockets,
feeling the percussive judder of my bolter laying waste to all before me.
I was lost in the vitality of it. The suns were up, we were in close-packed, furious combat and the ice-clear air was racing over
our armour plate. I have never wanted more than that.
The convoy broke. Slower vehicles had their armour penetrated first, and they rocked and bucked with explosions. Monstrous
engines took shots to tractor units and crashed, nose-first, into the earth. Trailers swung upwards, tumbling and rolling. Scrap fragments
spun high with the force of internal explosions. Jetbikes streaked past, scything like thrown spears through the carnage.
I closed on my chosen prey, standing in the saddle, guiding my speeding mount with my legs and pulling my glaive from its
back strapping. My nineteen brothers of the minghan-keshig came in close alongside me, committed to the same trajectory. We
spun and raced through the dense hail of bursting energy weapons and solid rounds. Jochi was there, as were Batu and Jamyang
and the others, all crouched over the plunging chassis of their bikes with their blood up and rapture in their eyes.
My prey was at the centre of the convoy – a huge eight-wheeler, crowned with an unruly spine of guns and swivelling grenade
launchers. A platform had been mounted high on a shaky looking suspension array, around which hung thick plates of looted
armour painted in splashes of red and green. Many dozens of orks jostled for position up there: some armed, some operating the
vehicle’s mounted weapons. Two massive smokestacks vomited fumes at the rear as the whole structure bounced and tilted, crashing
along with the rest of the collapsing convoy.
They were not stupid, nor were they slow. A storm of spitting beams streaked out at us, burning past our ears and ploughing
up the earth beneath. I took a hit on my pauldron and slewed hard to my left; behind me another bike was downed in a careening,
plummeting orgy of blurred flame and wreckage.
At the last moment I jumped, propelled high by my power armour and thrown clear onto the platform itself. I crashed through the
barrier and on to the tilting surface, swinging my guan dao round in a bloody arc as I landed. The disruptor blazed, leaving streaks of
shimmering silver in the air as the blade whipped across.
I gloried in the use of the glaive. It danced in my fists, spinning and punching, hurling ork bodies clear from the platform. I
ploughed through them, breaking bone and shattering armour. Orks reeled away from me, staggering and yowling.
I roared with pleasure, my limbs burning, my shoulders wreathed in a fountain of sun-glittered blood. My hearts pumped, my
fists flew, my spirit soared.
A big one got close, its left arm mangled by a bolt-detonation. It came right at me, head low, claws grasping. It carried a rusty
cleaver; the blade swung round.
The guan dao lashed out, taking the monster’s arm off at the wrist. Then it switched back, so fast the blade-edge seemed to cut
the air itself in a smear of crackling energy, bursting its head open in a cloud of blood and bone.
Before the body had crashed to the deck I was moving again, cutting, whirling, leaping, swaying. My brothers joined me, throwing
themselves from their bikes and onto the platform. There was barely room for us all; we had to kill quickly.
Jochi took out one of the gun operators, driving his blade into the creature’s spine and ripping out the chain of bones with a flourish.
Batu got into trouble taking on two at once, and was punched heavily in the face for his error. His bloodied chin snapped back,
and he staggered to the edge of the platform. Projectiles hammered into his breastplate, but they failed to knock him off.
I didn’t see how his fight ended – by then I was closing in on the warlord. It lumbered towards me, shoving its own kind out of
the way in its eagerness to get into combat. I laughed to see that; not from mockery, but from approval and delight.
Its skin was dark and puckered with greying scars. It swung a huge, iron-headed hammer in two hands, and the weapon growled
with moving blades.
I swerved away, missing the grinding teeth by a finger’s width. Then I span back in close, my guan dao shivering with angry
energy as it worked. I hit it twice, taking chunks of its heavy plate armour, but it didn’t fall.
It swung again, hurling the hammerhead in a bludgeoning arc. I ducked sharply, using the pitch of the platform, veering away
and down, with the back-sweep of the glaive to balance me. We were like dancers at a death ceremony, weaving back and forth,
our movements fast, close, heavy.
It lashed out again, its face contorted with frothy rage, piling its immense strength into a shuddering, whistling transverse
sweep. If that strike had connected I would have died on Chondax, thrown from the moving platform and driven into the dust with
my back snapped and my armour shattered.
But I had seen it coming. That was the way of war for us – to feint, to entice, to enrage, to provoke the slip that left the defence
open. When the hammer moved, I knew where it was going and just how long I had to get around it.
I leapt. The glaive glittered as it cartwheeled, the blade turning in my hands and around my twisting body. I soared over the
ork’s clumsy lunge, up-ending the shaft of the guan dao and pointing it down, seizing it two-handed.
The beast looked up groggily, just in time to see my sun-flashed blade plunge through its skull. I felt the carve and slap of its
flesh and skull giving way, gouged into a bloody foam by the plummeting energy field.
I clanged back to the deck, wrenching the glaive free and swinging it around me in a gore-flinging flourish. The ravaged remains of
the warlord slumped before me. I stood over it for a single heartbeat, the guan dao humming in my hand. All around me I could hear
the battle-cries of my brothers and the agony of our prey.
The air was filled with screams, with roaring, with the grind and crack of weapons, with the swelling clouds of ignited promethium,
with the hard burn of jetbike thrusters.
I knew the end would come quickly. I didn’t want it to end. I wanted to keep fighting, to feel the power of my primarch burn
through my muscles.
‘For the Great Khan!’ I thundered, breaking back into movement, shaking the blood from my weapon and searching for more.
‘For the Khagan!’
And all around me, my brothers, my beloved brothers of the minghan, echoed the call, lost in their pristinely savage world of
rage and joy and speed.
