The Solar War

by John French

  ‘Lord Dorn, this is the ship of your Legion,’ she had said.

  ‘And the flagship of your command now, admiral.’ And he had nodded once, his eyes unblinking. ‘It was always going to be like this. No matter what else we planned, or designed.’ He had placed a hand on her shoulder. The golden digits felt heavy. ‘You know what is needed, and when to return.’

  ‘Yes, Lord Praetorian.’

  ‘Admiral,’ said a signal officer, ‘we are picking up a signal in reply to our broadcast.’

  ‘It is authentic?’

  ‘The code ciphers match those agreed by the contingency protocols,’ said the officer. ‘It is a ship of the Fifth Legion.’

  She nodded to herself. It was a beginning.

  Darkness rolled through the light of the sun. Ships came from the rift cut into the skin of space without cease: ships touched by the warp and the hands of the Dark Gods, vessels of war and exploration now become cathedrals of iron weeping cries into the night.

  In his throne room, Horus stood before the grand viewport set behind his throne and looked out at the void. He saw as the last survivors of Camba Diaz’s fleet pulled away from Mars. He saw as the great slab-ships descended to the surface of the Red Planet, Hal’s nine prime disciples, Nul to Oct, kneeling in the dust before the Fabricator General.

  He saw the defences of Luna fall silent, bit by bit, and Abaddon – faithful and true Abaddon, first and best of his sons – pause beside a pool of water in a deep chamber as the echo of distant gunfire touched his ears. He saw Abaddon turn his head to look up through the shaft in the ceiling, and see not the sun but Terra looking back with reflected light. He saw Layak, the last of his soul dwindling, watching Abaddon, and listening to the distant song of a prophecy that Horus had not heard.

  And the Warmaster’s gaze went on.

  He saw the Phalanx roll to come about, its golden hull bleeding from its wounds. Ships detached from its flanks, and fired their engines, boosting back across the gulf towards Terra.

  The Phalanx’s engines flared as it arced away from Terra into the depths of the void above the system’s orbital disc. Ships waited there: the scattered vessels of the V Legion, and the remains of the ships that had slowed Perturabo’s passage from Uranus to Jupiter. The Phalanx would find its daughters and cousins, and spill more blood before all was done.

  A detail, like the survival of Rogal Dorn, now running to Terra’s walls – a detail that mattered little in the turning of this moment.

  ‘All ends are mine,’ he said to the light beyond. And in the void his host bore down on the Throneworld of the Imperium.

  Terra

  It was the thirteenth of Secundus, but day was still to break over the eastern battlements of the Palace. In the night sky above, the grey ship and the Persephone and Ophelia plunged down through the cordons of atmospheric defences as enemies chased after them. The guns of Terra started firing. The thickening atmosphere shook and screamed. Surface batteries opened up. Across the face of Terra, rockets punched into the sky from buried silos.

  One of the traitor vanguard struck a drift of mines on the edge of the high orbital defences. Plasma ripped through its hull. More mines detonated. Behind it, more and more ships swarmed into orbit.

  The ships that had come from the Phalanx, and across the system from Pluto’s fall, fired their retros as they burned through Terra’s atmosphere. Drop-ships scattered from their flanks and plunged down towards the Palace, fire feathering their wings. Escort fighters fell into formation with them.

  The light of the new day falling on the eastern Palace walls shredded to shadows as vast ships crowded across the sun. Across the face of the planet, from the hives still soaked in night to the southern polar fortresses, the guns fired. And far below the pillars of energy pouring up into the sky, people clung to each other in the dark, or cradled weapons that they barely knew how to use.

  Gunships touched down amongst the towers of the Palace. Doors pistoned open. Warriors in yellow and black poured out. With them walked Rogal Dorn. He paused on the landing platform as, high above, a chain of orbital mines detonated in a rippling explosion. Debris fell as shooting stars. Fire spread across a sky growing dark with the ships. Aircraft swarmed and spun in high orbit, spreading and chasing flames through the burning air.

  It was the thirteenth of Secundus, and the warning sirens, which had sounded for six weeks, rose in voice as the first shells fell from the sky.

  ∞

  ‘Here we are… Here we are at last…’

  The man does not look up from the fire. It has almost died to embers. The glow held in each splintered branch is fading from yellow to red as he watches it. The stranger who stands on the other side of the fire is tall and broad, with a face distilled from the images of kings and conquerors through the ages. He wears black, just like the man sat beside the fire, but his garments are heavy and regal where the seated man’s cloak and clothes are ragged and worn. The pelt across the standing man’s shoulders is thick, and the head of a beast hangs over his shoulder. Rings glint on his gloved fingers, the gems set into each catching the dim light of the burning wood: amethyst, ruby, emerald, sapphire.

  ‘Will you not talk now, father?’ says Horus. ‘Will you not tell me the truth?’ He squats down, eyes catching the ember-glow just as the rings on his fingers do. ‘I am here. I am alone.’

  The man beside the fire raises His head slowly. He looks old, His skin lined and folded with time, His hair white, but His eyes are black from edge to edge, like the holes left for eyes in the bronze statues of dead ages.

  ‘You are never alone now,’ He says, and turns His gaze to the shadows of the trees. ‘I see you,’ He says to the dark. For an instant the fire flares bright. Sparks fountain up, and the light is not dim but blinding. Brilliance pours into the spaces between the bare trunks and branches. Things of feather and fur and scale and bone shrink and snarl. But they do not retreat, and after the light fades, the shadows flow back to press close around the ember-glow.

  ‘Hypocrisy and hubris, father,’ says Horus. ‘I don’t know why it never struck me before it was revealed to me. You are a despot, no better than those whom you cast down to make your realm… A king with a false crown who built His throne on lies and slaughter and maintains it by force. Higher purpose, greater ends to justify any deed, all are just the painted skin on a rotting skull… I know, father. I have seen.’

  The man beside the fire does not move, and the void of His gaze holds unblinking.

  ‘Illumination…’ says Horus. ‘That is what you used to call our goal. Truth and light… Well, I have seen it, father. I am illuminated. All is revealed to my sight and there is no veil between me and the flame of truth.’

  Horus shifts, and for a second he does not seem a man, but a shadow of something vast and hunched and furred caught in the light of a blaze much brighter than the fading embers before them.

  ‘You still have some strength,’ says Horus and raises his ringed hand. Slowly, he reaches down into the fire and grips a glowing shard of wood. He lifts it, smoke fuming from where his skin chars. Horus holds the ember up, and the red fire glow lights his face. The heat in the fire fades, becomes cold black, then powdered ash. Horus looks at the Emperor for a long second and then stands, his presence stretching up into the bare branches and night sky. ‘But you are not strong enough. You never were.’

  The Emperor looks back to the dead ash of the fire before Him. Then He closes His eyes, and the image of the forest and fire and the face of His false son flee away into the distance, and there is only the voice of Horus, cold and laughing as it echoes after.

  ‘Run,’ it calls. ‘Run, father, and know that I am coming. Run!’

  “‘I remember, and for years I have tried to hold on to that memory.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Because it matters.’”

  Because it matters… Tha
t was the thought that ran through my mind as I was working on The Solar War. A part of me could not believe that we were here, at the Siege of Terra, and another part of me thought that, of course, it was inevitable. One thing, though, was absolutely clear to me, this story was more important than anything else I had written for Black Library.

  Why, though?

  The answer seems obvious, doesn’t it? I mean, the first book in the most anticipated part of the biggest science fantasy series ever – that matters, right?

  Yes, but as I started in on a long process of research and planning I found that reason was not at the heart of why it mattered to me, or why I felt it mattered to the universe that it is set in. The answers that I found to those questions became the blood and bones of the book that you hold in your hand.

  Cosmic and eternal conflict

  “He is waiting. He has always been waiting. In this place there is no time, not truly, not unless the forces within its tides dream it into being. Here, eternity is truth.”

  The Siege of Terra is not just a battle that happens with guns and swords; it is a battle that resonates across dimensions. It’s not just a final battle between the Emperor’s loyal sons and those that turned against him. It’s the story of Chaos trying to swallow mankind. When Horus meets the Emperor blade to blade, it’s a battle that has a huge symbolic significance in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. It matters not just because of who is involved, but because of what it means. And it means everything.

  This sense of mythic weight was something I thought about a lot in the lead up to writing The Solar War, and was something that the Siege of Terra writers spent a long time talking about amongst ourselves. There were two battles going on in the Siege: the first is a battle in the warp, a battle of symbolism, and magic, and myth; and another battle going on just this side of the shadows, a battle of blood and steel. These two sides of the battle needed to be shown right from the beginning of the Siege, not only because it is the reason the whole thing was happening, but also because it makes clear what is at stake – not the Imperium, not the Emperor or Terra, but humanity, body and soul.

  This cosmic conflict was something so important, that I decided to open The Solar War, and therefore the whole Siege of Terra series, with Horus and the Chaos gods confronting the Emperor in the warp.

  “The darkness becomes a forest, dark trunks reaching to an untouchable sky, roots crawling out and down into the abyss beneath. The man on the chair is sitting on the snow-covered ground, a fire burning before Him. A shadow moves out of the dark between the trees. It is huge, sable-furred and silver-eyed. It drags its shadow with it as it comes forwards. It pauses on the edge of the light.”

  In this scene, and the scenes in the warp that punctuate the book, both Horus and the Emperor are shifted into symbolic figures. The Emperor is deliberately shown as a normal man. He is not a figure in golden armour, but a human sat on a throne. He is every person at this moment, a fact that is underlined as we see flickers of other views of him.

  “[…] a figure of iron and blades with coal-furnace eyes is looking back at Him from a throne of chrome. Then it is gone, and the reflection is a blur of images falling one atop another: a golden warrior standing with drawn sword before the gates of a towering fortress, a figure before the mouth of a mountain cave, a boy with a stick and fear in his eyes, a queen with a spear atop a cliff, an eagle with ten wings beating against a thunder-threaded sky – on and on, images tumbling over each other like the faces of cards tossed through the air.”

  The Emperor has put himself in the place of all humanity – alone, strong, defiant, arrogant, and facing an overwhelming foe. Horus and the forces of Chaos take the form of a wolf, an image that is repeated through The Solar War in the scenes in the warp, dreams and moments when the cosmic conflict spills into reality.

  “He pushes himself up.

  At his back he hears the cry of wolves. He stops, turns. The light of the burning torch in his hand ripples out in the gusting wind.”

  “‘Son.’ He turned. His mother was there, standing in an open door. Behind her, he could see white snow, and a black sky. Shapes like the stretched shadows of pylons grasped at the silver circle of a moon. Were those trees? Was that what a forest looked like?”

  “A laugh now, a full, high laugh that might have been Nilus, or Keeler, or Loken, or the howl of wolves in a winter-shrouded forest.”

  These are old ideas and symbols that key into very primal ideas of threat and survival: cold, hunger, darkness, isolation and a knowledge that there is something out there that wants the flesh off our bones, something that we can’t see. The forest at night, the howl of wolves crops up again and again in myths, fairy stories, art and fiction. It’s about fear. The oldest fears that stalked people before we had the knowledge to be able to dismiss the shadows as just shadows. In Warhammer 40,000, the Chaos gods are supposed to have grown out of the fears and desires of sentient creatures. They exist because people look into the dark and believe in nightmares. They are our fears at the cry on the cold air.

  I explored this imagery in each of the three interludes in the warp; the forest, the darkness and the wolves return each time, but each time the light keeping them back gets smaller, gets weaker. That fire is, hopefully obviously, the Emperor’s psychic strength. His soul is literally keeping the Chaos gods back, but bit by bit it is being squeezed, it is becoming smaller and the darkness is pressing closer.

  “The man beside the fire raises His head slowly. He looks old, His skin lined and folded with time, His hair white, but His eyes are black from edge to edge, like the holes left for eyes in the bronze statues of dead ages.

  ‘You are never alone now,’ He says, and turns His gaze to the shadows of the trees. ‘I see you,’ He says to the dark. For an instant the fire flares bright. Sparks fountain up, and the light is not dim but blinding. Brilliance pours into the spaces between the bare trunks and branches. Things of feather and fur and scale and bone shrink and snarl. But they do not retreat, and after the light fades, the shadows flow back to press close around the ember-glow.

  ‘Hypocrisy and hubris, father,’ says Horus.”

  Now, it’s worth saying something about the Emperor in this picture. He is the defiance of humanity faced with its fear and the dark. But, and brace yourselves, that does not make him the ‘good guy’ – that just makes him a person. The words spoken by the Emperor to the Chaos gods and the words spoken by Horus to the Emperor have more than a kernel of truth to them. The Emperor is a despot and a tyrant, there is very little room to doubt that. He has done terrible things in pursuit of what he sees as ultimate victory – triumphing over the age old darkness that stalks humanity. And importantly, he is alone. Even in the scene where we see him meet psychically with Malcador, there is a sense of distance and isolation. Malcador does the talking and the Emperor says very little.

  “The man in gold lifts his own bowl, and takes small mouthfuls, never taking his eyes from his companion.

  ‘I am sorry to call you here,’ says the man in gold when there are only crumbs in the old man’s bowl, ‘but we need to speak.’ The man in black wipes the back of his hand across his mouth. His eyes are black depths in the weathered skin of his face. ‘Things are pressing in and in,’ continues the young man. ‘So far the attack has been as we would expect. But there is something else, something that is outside of that…’”

  He has taken his burden and does not include others in that ­circle of light. He is alone in the dark looking at the possibility that he has not saved humanity, but brought it to the brink of annihilation. He is flawed. He is human. His mistakes are the mistakes of a human, but with the power of a god.

  Blood and sacrifice

  This story was always going to involve a lot of destruction and a lot of death; it’s part of the setting. But I didn’t want its appearance to be slight. I wanted the progress of war and its price in lives to be shocking and mov
ing. The Solar War is a story of just how quick and cruel death can be and how much and how little it matters in events of this scale. I wanted bleakness and a truth to the price of this war. There is heroism and there are extraordinary deeds, but I wanted to create a feeling that they were just flashes in a sea of fire.

  So, to show that remorseless death, I deliberately put effort into introducing and building characters who would not make it to the end of the book, and whose deaths might not come in moments of heroism or villainy, but simply arrive. Sarduran, Jubal Khan, Vek, Boreas, Aksinya: all could have gone on, following arcs of change and revelation, but instead they end where they did, cut short, because it is that kind of war and that kind of story.

  Perhaps, this was never more on my mind than at the moment when Vek dies with a prayer for protection on his lips:

  “‘All you need to do is trust…’

  Vek could see Noon and Mori’s faces in his mind, more clear than the red shadows that moved close.

  ‘This one is alive,’ said a voice from close by. Vek suddenly realised how quiet everything had become. The lights still blinked, but there were no alarms, no shouts…

  ‘Just trust?’ he had asked. ‘That does not seem like much.’

  ‘It is everything,’ she had said. ‘It is everything, my love.’

  He was looking up into a black eye-slot set into a crimson-lacquered helm.

  ‘The Emperor…’ he managed, hearing the gurgle and rasp in his own words. The barrel of the gun eclipsed the sight of the room. He could see the scorching inside its muzzle. ‘The Emperor p–’”

  He should live, shouldn’t he? That would be the kind thing to do, the reassuring story to tell, but this is a story where that kind of hope and faith is not enough, and the reality is that it is going to end in blood and sacrifice and loss.

  In contrast, Boreas dies what might be thought a hero’s death, but ultimately all that is left to give meaning to that moment is the bond between him and his battle-brothers.