Hammer and Bolter Issue 15 by Edited by Christian Dunn

Author:Edited by Christian Dunn
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Science Fiction, Magazine, Short Story
Publisher: BL Publishing
Published: 2011-12-04T07:00:00+00:00

The Pact

Sarah Cawkwell

‘And the stolen voices of his venerable kin will welcome him, embrace him and bear him to the heart of our scarred past, the first home of the Argent Order. There, the ashes of the great destroyer lie mingled with the fading embers of our birth, two banners falling as one to call him back. Back to the beginning. Then will the past be revealed.’

– From The Orthodoxy of Varsavia, Author Unknown, 221.M37

Nothing had survived.

Once, according to the records, the planet Lyria had boasted fertile and verdant grassland which generated seemingly endless supplies of food for the people of the Imperium. Agri-habs had dotted the landscape in the south of the single large continental mass and people had worked the soil diligently. The mountains and rockier terrain in the north had been far less hospitable. But as the saying went, where there was a will there was a way and the indigenous tribal people of the world settled wherever they could find flat ground. Thus they had lived and thus they had prospered as was humanity’s way.

Now it was all gone. The combined might of the Silver Skulls fleet as they had unleashed the full wrath of the Emperor’s fury on the surface had made certain of that. Rendered essentially sterile with a hostile, barely breathable atmosphere by the missiles and guns of the fleet, Lyria fell into decay and became a forbidden place; an unsightly mark on the exceptional record of those who consider themselves amongst the Emperor’s most loyal.

Lyria, a world of beginnings; the former home of the Silver Skulls Chapter had become a tomb world, rendered to ashes and dust.

The air was acrid and stifling from the heat that bubbled up through rifts in the ground. Volcanoes that had lain long dormant had been awakened by the orbital onslaught and seismic activity rocked the planet almost continually. It was a world that would have been better left dead.

Six figures picked their way across the broken landscape, ascending a mountain path that would take them to the long-deserted fortress-monastery. For eight thousand years, no Silver Skulls battle-brother had laid eyes on their ancestral home. Now they did so in silence, each absorbing the impact of this horrific sight in their own way.

Five of the figures were massive, clad in ancient Terminator armour. The other was wearing the blue battle plate of a Prognosticator, a psychic hood rising about his bare head and a force axe slung comfortably across his back. It was this warrior who crossed into the entrance first.

By Adeptus Astartes standards, Prognosticator Bhehan was young. Barely thirty solar years old, he had nonetheless acquitted himself admirably upon the field of battle. His ability to divine the skeins of fate had proven itself over and over again. He had served with both Eighth and Fifth Companies with distinction, but had never once imagined that he would end up deployed with the Talriktug; the First Company’s elite squad. Especially following his vision; a vision that had led to Chapter Command agreeing that the time was right for them to return.

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