The Last Days of Aslakalieon
The hive Aslakalieon, home to uncounted billions, was unremarkable as they go. Fed by the vast agroponic facilities of the Mideran, defended on high by the Kantor fleet and upon the earth by the elite Castellan units of the Imperial Guard, life was for most of its souls a faithfully prosecuted rotation of shifts in the manufactora, masses in the public shrines, and leisure where it could be found. It was a place of peace, for the most part. Millennia ago a xenos warhost had made landing on Sriand and laid seige to Aslakalieon’s hive cousin, the now-mythical Gorommea, and pulled that jewel of the south seas to the ground with their weapons of glass and obsidian. But the invaders had been repelled, and besides the occasional outbreak of cult activity in the underhive catacombs, Aslakalieon was a place of tranquility, duty, and faith.
It had been founded 7 centuries before on the highlands of Grammatoni, the largest of Sriand’s many continental islands. The founding lords of the Cateract Palaiologian, in sighting the adamantine spike of the future hive, had seen fit to indulge their obsession with, and mastery of, astral cartologicum, making the strange choice to place the tower atop the Dunayev Mountains, with the design that once every 9 and a quarter Terran years, as the planet passed through its perihelion with the Swanstar, the high aeries of Aslakalieon would be the nearest point to that sun’s burning body.
On the 758th such occasion of stellar concordance, precisely as Sriand and its star were closer than they’d been in a Terran decade, melta charges placed years earlier by shadowed and furtive hands detonated along a ancient fault in the spine and sheared its crown, that portion which had over the years come to be known as the Asakuri Spire, from its moorings. It slid from its perch and fell, ponderously, like a sword plunging into a heart, its black iron bulk bursting through demenses, hab-blocks, manufactora, promethium works, burning fast into the underhive like a comet ploughing deep into a planet’s crust, leaving a crater hundreds of meters wide ringed with shattered rockcrete, bursting wires, gushing pipes, raining glass, and dumbstruck weeping survivors in its wake. When it impacted the Dunayev regolith the fastness collapsed in upon itself, and its 800,000 facade panels, each devotionally etched with holy images of the divinatory mark of Scarus, the sun-palm hand of the God in Repose, the Branched Wing of Saint Astera, the Daybreak Scales, the Palaiologian Quadrad, and countless others, all shattered into fragments, the Sacred Caryatids of the 16 Martyrs buckled to dust, and the Azure Eye burst. The functionaries and courtly members of the House of Aslaka and the Cataractus Severon who had moments ago been tending the eternal machinery of Aslakalieon within its concentric halls had screamed and wailed and prayed on their sudden descent from upper orbit. Now, as tombs go, they could do worse.
Days later, Broeva and Darien, the last of the 82nd Pacification Battalion, along with three faceless Arbites commanders, patrolled cautiously along the Mariona Way in the flickering dark of the midhive. Broeva’s unfamiliar hellgun, taken from an already-dead Aslaka Castellan, was hot in her hands, warm like a body would be, ready to vomit killing light. The Arbites’ vox clicked in their helmets. They went one way instead of another at an intersection, and Darien attempted to make meaningful eye contact with her. She knew what that look meant. She ignored it.
For three days the Arbites had lead the survivors of the 82nd through the warrens of Zona Combinata. At the beginning there had been 15 Arbites and 24 soldiers like them, drilled in war, all refugees from the crushed and burning barracks of the Preopteran Mount. The five were all that remained. Broeva had not once seen their attackers. People far more battle-hardened than her were dead, disappeared. Sergeant Lucien, minor hero of the Seige of Battaranda, had been one of the first to go, and hours later his head was discovered floating a meter above the ground in a dark side alley by little Keon, unsupported save for some sort of hidden force. Lucien’s head was vomiting choleric black blood without relent, but his eyes still blinked and scanned the assembled survivor’s army in horror as they ringed round their discover. They had tried to move him, and when that proved impossible, to destroy his remains, all to no avail. The ichor issuing from his wheezing mouth had pooled into a sunless reservoir in that alley, and as the time passed two soldiers were lost into it without a sound. The second was Keon. Broeva suspected suicide. After hours of frustrated attempts to properly lay Lucien to rest the Arbites had ordered them to move on. To where was anyone’s guess but theirs. At points they stopped and handed out ration caps. After a time they had approached the Sepulchre of the Many Teeth, seeking sanctuary, but upon their approach a screaming wail had struck their ears, and the holy steeple, that sentinel which was at its apex blessed by real atmosphere and true sky, had fallen in. The light through the hole in the scrapfloor it had risen through was not the sapphire blue Broeva had heard of but a sickly crimson of forgotten gore which turned the stomach. Outside the Sepulcher, absently picking through the circled bodies of the Castellans for food or water, Broeva had taken possession of the hellgun. To date she had fired it once into a shadow, seeking vengeance on an barely-glimpsed assailant, but when she looked for her kill she only saw Mosth, her bunkmake, with her flimsy ceramite-weave body armor shredded and singed, Broeva’s bolt having burned a hole through her torso and out her back. For a moment, the horror at her murder burned Broeva’s mind insane, oppressive; the next, she turned and continued the slow walk down the line with the survivors. No one else had noticed.
Either days or hours or minutes ago, the five or 12 or 23 of them had stopped to sleep in the now-drained sleep pool of a fyceline munitions refinery. Broeva had laid on her back and stared at the ceiling far overhead, cloud wisps pooling in the peaks of the pointed vaults. It was then the power went out in total. In those realms and levels and self-obsessed worlds which had never seen the sun, the darkness was not particularly the problem—even the blackest night usually had enough light for an Aslakalan to see in. But the hive’s power stations, buried deep in the gnarled heart of Sriand and manned solely by special-purpsoe extremophilic servitors, had never once gone silent. Those who had been to the Schola knew that the generators, holy relics from the Dark Age of Technology, drew power from the veins of Sriand’s dead earth, and that they would never fail unless the planet itself cracked in two. This was too much to bear. Three more people, including an Arbites, had committed suicide in their camp that night. Another had walked away into the dark, which was effectively the same thing. None of the remaining seemed to be concerned with the missing. Broeva did not sleep. She kept her hand on the chioknife, sheathed at her back. Twice did she hear murmuring whispers with no source. The man next to her awoke with his throat slit by an unseen force and another died in his sleep, simply and quietly, but up close his face was frozen in a terrified scream.
After weeks or years or decades of fearful languidity, an Arbites silhouette had formed against the black had flashed a lumens twice and bade them march. At Sarion Plaza they had moved up the great Pinigog Ascension to the upperhive, the great triumph’s marble breadth and gold filigree somehow radiant in the gloaming light. They had numbered 47 then, Broeva remembered. Including herself or not, she wasn’t sure. What she did remember: at the top of the ramp, as the light levels began to rise the air filled with music, with laughter, with sweet smells of the light she had never experienced before. A man—no, far bigger, far more bent, moving while standing still, tanned as a corpse may be left in an airless room, bulked hugely with delicate silver armor of runaway curvature which seemed no stronger than parchment, but which repelled even the lead Arbites’ stormbolter up to the precise point that its whirling iridescent blades carved the gun from its owner’s hands and the owner’s head from its body. It paused then, front darkened by the light of paradise emanating behind it, las-shots popping against the beautiful sculpture of its panoply, and then as if answering to a signal unheard became a dervish of violence, intangible save the leading edge of its blades. The onslaught claimed 3, 4, 5, 6 before Broeva could raise her purloined hellgun and the shot went straight through. The gun was flung from her hands by some jarring force projected from the center of the storm, and her wrist was broken. She fell. The death of an Arbites and two soldiers had stalled one of its blades, the keening stopped on their meat and bone; in response the angel of death seemed to sigh, even as its other sword claimed heads and rent flesh; a sickly sweet smell of burning fuel and canid growl heralded the whirring glint of a chainsword’s teeth; leaving its other blade through the torso of Lieutenant Borovan it grasped the chainsword in both hands and brought it bodily in an executioner’s swing upon a charging Arbites, his legs and left shoulder shattering withthe force of the blow as it drove him into the marble flags before the sword’s teeth could even catch, and the throwback of gristle and blood cast wild patterns upon the faces and bodies of those living, boiling away when it touched the creature’s argentum armor. The laughing from up the ramp was louder, more pleasant than ever before, and the music swelled into a melody of heartbreaking beauty. Seemingly in response, the silver warrior folded into a rising plume of crimson smoke and disappeared, even before the eviscerated Arbites could hit the ground.
Presently, the survivors elected to move up the ramp, even though it seemed the monster’s heaven had departed with him, leaving a churning gloom. The scout Sharap went first, prone, and peered over the edge. He waved the rest up, his face grim. There was no arcadia to be found at the ramp’s head—just a graveyard of flayed corpses and daubed sigils on conapt windows, rendered from the inside in blood.
Time no longer mattered. The silver torturer sometimes reappeared, reaping a life or two before disappearing again, folding into a moment of billowing smoke. Sometimes there was one Arbites leading them, sometimes a dozen; faces disappeared and reappeared, Sergeant Lucien was sometimes at her side and sometimes drowning in ichor in that dim alley; the broken yet potent reaper in Astartes battleplate would on occasion lurch from a doorway, seemingly drunk and perverse in every way Broeva’s schooling told her those angels would never be, and once, the last time, she had known, really known, and been waiting for him, and sunk her chioknife into the eye socket of its impassive gold mask, and seen the man in there, and screamed and sunk it in even deeper with her entire emaciated weight behind it, and saw his eye burst inside the helmet, already speared as it was with the shattered glass of his visor, and pushed it further and further still, to the hilt, and she knew she had hurt him, perhaps unto death, even before she let the dead man’s switch of the hilt go, and the 82nd standard issue chioknife, the suicide-knife, the quick-fuse in its hilt detonated, and she pulled her arm back in a tatter of blood and bone, but the gigantic demon was somehow untouched, its armor merely blackened from the blast, and she knew as the seconds of the irresistable swing of its infernal axe stretched out infinitely, so long that the mythic Swanstar burned to nothing, that she was to spend eternity away from the God in Repose’s side, far from his light. She had failed not only herself, nor Aslakalieon, but His Holy Imperium. She died without a sound.