The Solar War

by John French

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, still not turning. ‘I will just be a moment.’

  There were scratch marks on the pistol’s trigger guard, she noticed, silver metal showing through blue-black. Hundreds of gauntleted hands holding the bone grip had made those scratches as their fingers curled around the trigger. The trigger guard itself was big too, enlarged to fit a digit wrapped in void-armour. She wondered how many people had called the gun their own? How many had died with it in their grasp?

  She looked at the empty space in the velvet beside the gun, the empty outline of its twin. She reached out, as though her fingers would find something in the space that her eyes could not see.

  ‘I am sorry,’ Malcador had said. ‘We must have had this information for a while. For years, but the connection was never made.’

  She had not looked up from the scroll of parchment in her hands. It was thin enough to be translucent, she realised, the black machine-scribed letters seeming almost to float. So insubstantial, so… unreal.

  ‘Why now?’ she had heard herself ask. Then looked up at Malcador. The Regent’s eyes were steady on hers.

  ‘The Khan made a specific request, a demand actually, that we find anything and everything we could. He seemed to think it important that if there were answers to be had, you had them. I agree. Now of all times we must be certain of ourselves.’

  She had looked back at the parchment, at the words that had been highlighted with a neat line of red ink.

  ‘…wreckage assay confirm warship Thunder Break destroyed with all hands while trying to flee from the Isstvan System. Indications of command mutiny by traitor elements in crew leading to ship’s loss of power and destruction by main gun force of traitor vessels. Peripheral indications that captain had ordered ship to break from Horus’ force.’

  ‘I…’ she had begun to say and felt a numbness soak in from her skin. ‘I need to get back to my command.’

  ‘Of course,’ said the Regent, and was standing before she could protest. The effort sent a twinge of pain across his face. He walked with her to the door, leaning on his staff for each step.

  ‘It is wrong,’ she said as they reached the door and it hinged open. He stopped and looked at her. ‘This is one of thousands, of tens of thousands of front-line loss reports. There will be others, Lord Regent. Who knows how many millions waiting for news that has already become lost in history. That is wrong.’

  He nodded.

  ‘War makes the simplest failings cruelty, admiral.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It does.’

  She lifted the pistol out. Its weight, once so familiar, now felt different. She looked at it, sitting on her palms.

  Captain Khalia Su-Kassen Hon II; killed in action, Isstvan. That is what the updated record would read. An end of sorts, she supposed.

  ‘Admiral, the rating of the signals has increased to Vermillion-Aleph-four,’ said Archamus. ‘Your presence and response are required.’

  She took the ammunition cylinder from the case, opened the breech and snapped it into the pistol. A single smooth movement readied it and pulled the safety off. One squeeze of the trigger and a blizzard of metal shards would rip anything closer than twenty strides into tatters. Not a clean way to die. She hefted it. In her mind she saw Khalia accept its twin from her hand, and felt the awkward silence deepen as she tried to find something to say and her daughter tried to find a way of responding.

  ‘Admiral…’

  She looked around the shadow-filled room, released the safety catch and unreadied the weapon.

  ‘That belt and holster, there on the door. Hand it to me.’

  Archamus blinked once and then did as she asked. The weight of the pistol settled on her thigh as she walked from the room and mounted the stairs back up to the Bhab Bastion’s command chamber.

  ‘I am proud of you,’ she had said, at last. Khalia had looked at the weapon, a thing that had spent more time in her mother’s company than she ever had. Su-Kassen had thought her daughter was about to say something. Then Captain Khalia Su-Kassen Hon II had come to attention and bowed her head.

  ‘I am honoured, admiral,’ she had said, her voice perfect in its formality.

  She reactivated her direct vox- and data-link. Messages and command-grade transmissions began to ping in her ears. She cut them off and looked around at Archamus. The Space Marine would have been monitoring the communication flow and parsing the situation while he waited.

  ‘Situation precise,’ she said.

  ‘The First Sphere fleet has begun the counter-attack at the Khthonic Gate,’ he said. ‘The crown of Pluto’s moons is burning.’

  Rule of slaughter

  An end to duty

  Oathed to this moment

  Strike Frigate Lachrymae, Pluto

  The Imperial Fists fleet plunged back into the orbits of Pluto while they were still aflame. Drifts of cooling debris spread from the death points of the planet’s five moons. Ships still coming from the warp at the Khthonic Gate ploughed into a wall of wreckage travelling fast enough to shred their hulls. Brief stars flashed as ship reactors overloaded. Of the thousands that had come to take the outermost planet and its gate, hundreds remained, clawing for space in the burning dark.

  Into this crucible the ships of Sigismund’s fleet cut and began to kill. They came in a long diamond. The fastest ships led at the fore, their heavier sisters following. It was a formation that would have led to their destruction in most battles, but now they came to a battle sphere of scattered and wounded prey. The Three Sisters of Spite were the first to engage. They each carried a commander of the First Sphere: the ­Persephone was Fafnir Rann’s, and carried his Assault Cadre, while the Ophelia was the ship of Boreas, First Templar and Sigismund’s lieutenant. The Lachrymae remained Sigismund’s steed of war, as it had been since he had taken command of the outer system defences. Faster than all their kin, the three ships took the wounded battle cruiser Fire Gorgon first. Its engines damaged, its failing shields broken under the guns of the Ophelia and Persephone, it tried to bring its batteries to bear on its killers. The Lachrymae loosed its payload of torpedoes at point-blank range. The Fire Gorgon became a blink of light. The Three Sisters burned past the debris of their kill, already firing at their next victim.

  Behind them the Imperial Fists fleet followed, every gun firing without cease. There were targets enough and they were there not for battle, but for reaping.

  On the Lachrymae, Sigismund felt the rolling beat of the guns and his hearts rising in concert. He was not a creature of emotion. There were many who looked upon him with fear and awe, and some who thought him bellicose, driven by zeal: a warrior-fanatic of the Great Crusade. He was all those things in other eyes. But he was just a function, a necessity of time and need. He had been made one way by chance and time – the boy in the drift camps who was quick and fast, and took the beatings given by the other children but never let them break him, who survived for years after his father was lost to the dust-lung fever. He had been remade again, given strength and purpose, and an ideal to follow to the end of his life. And what he had been remade into was a weapon, a tool that shaped the world with its edge. That was his purpose, and he would follow it to the end of all things, until his edge was blunted and the strength in his arm unequal to his will. And that purpose did not require him to feel, only to go forwards. It was will, not fire, that moved his world: cold fire bound by chains. Even in shame, he had held to that. But this moment sung a chord in his soul that had been waiting within through every bitter defence and sacrifice.

  Vengeance, righteous and pure, filled Sigismund as he watched ships become fire and atoms. It felt cold, burning like the touch of ice. He opened a vox-channel with a glance at an officer.

  ‘Burn them from the stars,’ he said.

  And the blade of ships followed his command. Torpedoes were loosed almost blind into the traitor ships drifting
amongst the debris. Bombers sped into the dark from battle-barges, spinning amongst the clouds of shredded metal and rock. They found the fleet carrier Synobarb tumbling through the wreckage of its escorts. Its prow ripped from its body, it was still trying to relight its engines. The bombers bored into it, flying into the exposed ribs of its superstructure to loose their payloads deep in its core. Melta bombs ripped the shielding from its reactors. Wild plasma poured out, burning through the carcass and sending tongues of flame breathing through the holes in its skin.

  Some of the traitor craft still had the wit or the power to resist. Five swift-strike vessels in the black and yellow of the Templar elite penetrated the debris sphere left by Kerberos as they hunted a pair of Iron Warriors frigates. The grand cruiser Barb of Nostramo was waiting for them. It had fought its own war in the years since the first treachery, and its crew and masters had loyalty only to their own spite.

  Its reactor signature masked by the death-echo of the moon, the Barb of Nostramo had slid into the shroud of asteroids and waited. It met the five Imperial Fists strike vessels with a cloud of assault craft. Warriors in midnight armour poured into the Imperial Fists ships. Two escaped. The remainder died by inches, their decks flooded with the screams of those who had already fallen, their chambers and passages darkening one by one as power was cut. The few Imperial Fists on each fought to the last as the screams became silence, and the night surrounding them lit with red eyes and laughing voices.

  The two dozen frigates of the Saturnine Void Cohort curved deep into the space between Pluto and the Khthonic gate. They began to unleash barrages of torpedoes, some blind, others aimed.

  And amongst the slaughter, the Three Sisters moved and killed, splitting to thread the battle sphere in search of prey. They could not linger, but for this moment this was their kingdom, and its rule was slaughter.

  Horus Aximand heard the hull of the Throne of the Underworld groan as it made its turn. Steam and fluid vented from the pipes above as forces sheared and tugged at rivets and welds. The void shields were collapsing and sparking back to life as the outwash of debris from the moons’ detonations struck them.

  ‘Select and coordinate targets,’ he growled into the vox as he crossed the threshold into the teleportation chamber. ‘We will tear them from the dark.’

  The Throne of the Underworld and its fleet had been burning hard in pursuit of the fleeing Imperial Fists ships when the moons had detonated. The loyalist ships had turned about and arced back to the sphere of the outermost planet. Some had turned to meet Aximand’s vessels, but their only purpose was to delay, to allow Sigismund’s force to strike into the chaos around Pluto. It had worked. It had cost the Imperial Fists those ships they had sent as a distraction, but it had worked. Pluto was a death ground, the ruin of Aximand’s assault ash and wreckage in its orbits.

  But it would end now. He would take a blood price from the sons of Dorn, and he would do it with his own hand.

  ‘Find their command ship,’ he ordered over the vox. Around him, a cohort of his company veterans stood ready as the machines set into the teleportation chamber’s ceiling and floor began to sweat arcs of light. ‘Find Sigismund.’

  A rolling storm of fire struck the Lachrymae as she curved past a near-crippled warship. Her auspex did not have time to detect the source of the volley before her shields collapsed. Gravitic shells hammered into her flanks, crumpling and twisting armour with waves of shearing force. A pulse of plasma a hundred metres in diameter hit her engines and reduced half of them to gas and slag. She began to spin, the flame- and iron-filled void a blur around her. On her bridge, Sigismund felt explosions shake the deck. Red light pulsed through the air. The crew were shouting now, orders screamed as the hull shrieked.

  ‘Batteries nine through fifteen lost…’

  ‘Motive power at thirty-five per cent…’

  ‘Course stabilisation lost…’

  ‘Void generator power shunts offline!’

  ‘We are unshielded!’

  ‘Lord,’ called a signal officer. The man was gripping the edge of a console, the alarm lights staining his face red. ‘Lord, there is an enemy ship closing, fast. Class unknown but it’s big. They are launching assault craft.’

  ‘Sound a primary alert throughout the ship,’ said Sigismund. ‘Prepare to repel boarders.’

  ‘Etheric spike!’

  The cry rose a second before a thread of light coiled in the air above the command platform. The squad of Templars scattered through the bridge began to run towards the platform. Sigismund had time to raise his sword as light and shadow reversed and time stuttered. A pillar of lightning flashed into being, slamming into the deck and ceiling. It pulsed. Shapes stood within the light, vast shapes of metal and death. Then the light vanished, and gunfire roared through the sudden dark as the Sons of Horus opened up.

  Sigismund was already moving forwards, sword lit, the words of an old oath on his lips. The edge of his blade took the first of the Sons of Horus in the throat even before the flare of teleportation had faded. He was amongst them, cutting and cutting, killing with single blows as gunfire and blades reached for him.

  And on the Lachrymae fell, bleeding into the void as swarms of assault rams and claws punched into its flanks.

  Fire and the clamour of killing filled the bridge of the Lachrymae. Warriors in sea-green armour spread out, shooting as they moved. Pulped flesh and blood puffed into the air as bolt-rounds exploded amongst the crew and servitors. Sigismund saw the handful of Templars that had been on the bridge with him go down, singled out for overwhelming bursts of fire and then dragged down by blades. That fate would have been his too if he had submitted to it.

  The seconds faded. The world was running to the beat of his twin hearts, reduced to the edge and point and turn of his sword. They were all around him now, sea-green armour, descending blades, gun barrels turning to look at him with the empty eyes of a lost stranger. Too many. Too close. Too swift.

  He saw Aximand then, standing back from the killing whirl of his warriors, a snarling bronze-fronted helm beneath a red crest, a great sword sheathed at his back. A half-moon of jet and silver sat on his shoulder beneath the red eye of Horus.

  The weight of the sword in Sigismund’s hand seemed to vanish. The chains were gone. It would end here. All the years of war would end here.

  Death… alone and unremembered.

  He could see it all. The arc of a chainaxe sweeping down to cut his sword arm, the blow of a sword, the path of the rounds that would chew his legs from beneath him, on and on – the spinning truth of blades writing the words of death. He could read it all and see that there was no unravelling it.

  Death…

  Alone in the stars, not at his father’s side.

  Keeler had been wrong.

  Death and failure…

  He would die here.

  The realisation sank through him, and for the first time in perhaps all his life, he felt peace.

  But I will not die alone…

  His sword met the chainaxe blade edge to blade edge. Sparks and lightning shrieked through the air. He cut through the axe head, sword juddering in his grip as chain teeth sprayed into the air. He pushed the cut on and down into the chest of the warrior that had swung the axe. The traitor did not have time to fall. Sigismund rammed his weight forwards, pushing the blade down and out of the bottom of the warrior’s torso.

  A power sword thrust into the space Sigismund had just left. Its power field split the armour over his ribs. He slammed an elbow into the new attacker’s face. Bolts exploded on the deck and in the air around him, but he was already moving forwards, pulling his sword around to take the legs from under the warrior with the power sword, even as his comrade collapsed to the deck in a wash of gut-fluid and blood.

  This was not the swordplay of the duelling cages. It was what Khârn of the XII would have called ‘the truth of ba
ttle’. Stabbing, hacking, breaking. Killing without pause or cease as blood painted the world. It had a rhythm, though – a terrible and pure beat drummed out in the clash of blades and the roar of guns and the surge of muscle and blood. It was all around him, and within him, the last refuge of his soul, the home he had carved himself cut by cut.

  The Sons of Horus were good, battle-hardened and chosen for skill and ferocity. They were killers all. But they went backwards, formations and fire lines distorting as they tried to bring their guns and blades to bear on the Lord of Templars. Sigismund drove into them, every movement of his sword a strike. He barely registered the mass of them, his eyes fixed on Horus Aximand amongst the throng of his warriors. The jolt of blade parting armour, the steps that pushed him forwards past the cuts of his enemies – all fell away leaving only the path to this one enemy. He was going to die here. Sigismund knew that. The only choice left to be made was how.

  ‘Alone and unremembered…’ came the ghost-voice of Euphrati Keeler.

  He shrugged aside a blow from a hooked axe, felt its force crack his right pauldron and cut down. A gasp of fresh blood into the air, another body falling, another step forwards. Aximand was moving towards him now, his own blade unsheathed and lit. A shell exploded on his damaged shoulder. The ceramite shattered. Pain exploded through him and his next cut twitched aside from its mark. He caught the failed cut and raised his sword in time to meet a maul swung from just out of sight. Then another blow swinging in, hacking at his midriff, the attacker one amongst a crowd. A chainsword spun sparks as it raked down his arm, shredding armour from wrist to forearm.

  Blood. He could taste blood now.

  Aximand was coming close, unhurried. The sword in his hand was as broad as a mortal’s shoulders, a slaughterman’s blade.

  Sigismund turned another strike and sliced his own sword across a throat under a bronze faceplate. A concussive boom, and an explosion in his side. Pain. A world shattering into white slivers. He was not going forwards now, and the crowd of green armour was all around, striking, roaring.