The Gift of Hope By Andy Clark

Commissar Kalun Dresk paced his cell. He had been relieved of his black greatcoat, his peaked cap and bolt pistol. Still, he was confident that his upright bearing and steely gaze marked him out for what he was to even the densest of troopers.

Not that any were there to weather that gaze now. They had left to muster for the ritual nearly an hour earlier, and had told him as much before they went. They had sounded almost apologetic. It was as though they hoped to explain some dereliction of duty to him, perhaps to gain his blessing. If the situation hadn’t been so dire, Dresk might have chuckled grimly at the thought. Instead, he checked his wrist chron.

Minutes until it began.

He paced his cell again, wracking his brains, but he could see no way to avert what was coming.

‘God-Emperor, forgive my failure,’ he said into the silence.

Not silence. Not really. Not ever, anymore. Not since the monsters came. Even now he could hear their distant shrieks and howls, their cackling laughter and awful promises carried on the furnace-hot winds. He crossed to the iron barred window and looked down from the Commandant’s Fortress. He gazed over the ramparts of the curtain wall to where the unclean legions swirled like a nightmare tide. Guns boomed and cracked, raining fire upon the besieging entities. Explosions rose in their midst, illuminating brass-bound siege towers and obscene monsters of metal and fire as they stalked towards the walls.

‘At least they’ve still got soldiers on the battlements,’ Dresk said to himself. ‘At least we’re still fighting.’

But for how much longer?

Dresk shook his head. He knelt, formed his hands into the sign of the aquila over his breast, and began to speak in earnest. None would hear his confession but him on Terra.

As it should be.

‘God-Emperor, forgive me. I tried to make them see,’ Dresk began. He faltered for a moment as some ghastly being beyond the walls sent up an especially loud wail, then he pressed on regardless. There might not be much time.

‘It was the deadlock,’ he said to the air. ‘The grinding, bloody attrition of it, spreading feelings of hopelessness and despair. And the isolation. After the darkness came there were many who feared we were cut off, even that Holy Terra itself might have fallen. I shot several for just such faithless utterances, yet still the whispers persisted. Then… they came. The heralds of Chaos… the…’ he couldn’t bring himself to utter the word out loud, even now.

It was not a lack of strength or resolve, nor fear that stilled Dresk’s wavering tongue. It was revulsion. He would not sully the air by giving voice to their unholy truth.

‘They came and the war began. We fought, oh God-Emperor I pray that it made you smile to look down upon us and see how we fought!’ Dresk felt a stab of fierce pride at the memory of indomitable human spirit, holding firm in the face of horrors straight from the pages of scripture. He felt his face fall into a scowl as he remembered again the losses, the defeats, the slow retreat despite all they had done. ‘Then, hopeless deadlock,’ he said, and let out a long, slow breath.

His chron ticked.

Dresk felt a stirring, as though the air was thickening, becoming charged.

The ritual must have begun. He had little time to make his peace.

‘The fighting dragged on for cycle after cycle, turning after turning,’ he said. ‘We of stout heart fought on regardless, but the mutterings grew worse. The Astropaths couldn’t call out to the Imperium for help, it was said. Soldiers whispered that the warp raged. We are abandoned, they said. Some now openly claimed that we were doomed, and not all of their voices could be stilled. Then came the manifestations, spreading through our ranks like a plague. Mutation and madness were bad enough, and my bolt pistol sang its hymns of obedience almost as often as the regimental priests. Worse were the witches. How could so many appear, in such a short time? Was it the… beings… beyond the walls? Did they do this to us? Honest, Emperor-fearing men and women manifesting unholy powers as though from nowhere. Never mind that they gave us the edge in battle more than once, it was heresy, and I was forced to punish it as such, over and over again.’

He heard a bell toll. Its basso boom rolled along the fortress’ corridors, sounding somehow warped out of truth. It left him with tinnitus in his ears that did not fade, while around him the room seemed somehow brighter.

Dresk’s frown deepened.

Was this it?

He closed his eyes and spoke on, rushed words tumbling over one another in his haste to get them out.

‘When the alarms sounded that day, God-Emperor, I ran with pistol and blade in hand and my warriors at my back, for I truly believed that the foe had breached the walls. Instead, I found the xenos, already surrounded by staring soldiery and half the fortress’ senior command. Where they had come from none could say, but they spoke High Gothic with remarkable clarity, and they claimed to approach under a flag of parlay. Slender, overly tall and wholly alien, they wore strange masks that seemed to shift when you stared at them too long, and clinging black and white bodysuits of some heretical composition. God-Emperor, I would have struck them down then and there and gone back to the walls, but the Commandant… he listened to the xenos. He entertained their lies. They spoke of a common foe in Chaos, and of how the strange psychic malaise spreading through our ranks could be harnessed, with their aid of course, to focus the projections of our Astropaths and drive a message through the turbulent warp. They spoke of it as a Tech-Priest might strengthen the signal of a faulty vox-set. They offered us a crystal of great size and said they would teach us the ritual of its activation. They told us it would focus our… energies… and allow us to cry for aid. They offered us hope.’

The tinnitus whine was growing louder. Dresk winced at the sound and worked his jaw in the hope of shifting it, but it persisted. So did the impression of swelling light, illuminating his cell as though a flare had been struck within it. He rose and pressed fingertips to his philtrum. They came away bloody.

This had to be it. Dresk had warned that the xenos couldn’t be trusted, had even drawn his pistol and tried to shoot one of the masked interlopers in the hopes of provoking honest confrontation. He had wished to save his superiors from damnation by forcing their hand but, before he could take his shot,

he had found himself lost amidst a prismatic maze of illusion that left his senses reeling. The next thing had been a laspistol butt to the temple.

He had woken in this cell.

‘They wanted hope,’ he croaked, now tasting blood and hearing the whine rise into a thin wail of pain. ‘Hope I could not give them, not I nor their priests. They wanted to feel powerful in the face of such horrors, and the xenos used that. Used them.’

The wail had become a scream, not of one voice but of many, hundreds, a chorus of the damned invading his mind and intertwining with the sawing crystal note that continued to rise and rise. For an instant, Dresk saw as though through the eyes of another. He was assailed by flickering images of figures wreathed in white fire that poured from their eyes and mouths, flowing into a shuddering crystal that glowed brighter than a star. That light would annihilate them all, he realised. Them. The Daemons. Everyone.

Everyone except the xenos, who had vanished again as suddenly as they had come after they had imparted their gift.

‘God-Emperor, forgive me,’ gasped Dresk, as he watched waves of white fire roll out from the fortress’ walls to scour the Daemons from the land. As he saw that same fire dance before his lips and spill along his limbs like a corona.

‘God… Emperor…’ he forced the words out as unfettered psychic energy poured through him, burning him out from within as surely as it must every other living being in the fortress. The screams filled his mind until he felt it must surely burst like a sack of wet meat. The fire burned through his flesh, his bones, his soul.

The Imperium would hear their message, he realised as he burned, as white psychic fire washed everything else away and unbearable agony tore through every fibre of his body.

Just as the xenos had intended all along.

The Imperium would hear one final cacophony of screams from this damned world. Behind it, faint but inescapable, they would hear the mocking laughter that Dresk heard in his mind even now. The laughter of the xenos who had slain them all.