by David Guymer
Ruination could not wage war as her bellicose spirit yearned, confined to the Sthenelus System, and so the Vurgaan appeased her by bringing their wars to her.
Lydriik found that he was salivating, his remembrancer organ thrilling to the sour raiment of industrial-scale death.
‘I have not heard from you since we parted ways over Thennos,’ he said, eager to break the silence.
‘And I was surprised to hear from you now,’ Verrox grunted. His enormous shoulders rolled with his stride. ‘Garrison duty is a misery all must share, but the knowledge that Fell or Kristos will suffer equally after me does not make the burden any lighter. I would almost welcome a Thirteenth Black Crusade.’
Lydriik was an infrequently observant adherent to the Iron Creed, but he found himself miming the blessed cog. It had been almost three hundred years, his memories dimmed by childhood and the changes wrought on his psychology in the centuries since, but he remembered the Twelfth. It had been an active time for the Black Ships.
From the slow growl of his teeth, Verrox remembered it differently.
‘What of Stronos?’ asked Lydriik. ‘You must sit regularly with the Iron Council.’
‘Only when the monotony becomes too great and I must find a different breed of boredom to alleviate it.’
‘The Kristosian Question continues to be asked?’
‘Five hundred years I have endured, give or take. I was there on Keziah. I led the Vurgaan through the Gothic War. I have tasted the flesh of Devram Korda, fought every race that you have heard of and butchered more that exist no longer. I will be damned if I will let the Kristosian Conclave be the death of me.’
Lydriik could not help but chuckle.
He did miss the Vurgaan clan. They were aggressive, virile, brutal most certainly, but unashamedly so. They did not dress up their excesses with logic or reason. They were what they were, the same unflinching barbarians that the primarch had made them.
‘The sooner Stronos returns to my side of the argument the better.’
‘It takes thirty years to train a Techmarine,’ said Lydriik. ‘You think the question will still be unanswered when he returns?’
The Iron Father emitted a growling sigh. ‘There are Medusans as yet unborn who will claim seats on the Iron Council before this is resolved.’
Lydriik frowned. He had only observed the workings of the Iron Council from the outside, but he could well believe it.
‘Iron Father Stronos,’ Verrox muttered, shaking his clinking mane. ‘That he should climb so high in just a hundred years. Draevark was not pleased, you know. Not at all pleased.’ He chuckled in amusement. ‘If you had told me on Battakkan that the neophyte who had just destroyed my Thunderfire cannon would stand beside me in the Eye of Medusa, I would have torn open your throat and eaten your progenoids.’ His teeth whined. ‘Spare future generations from such flights of illogic.’
Lydriik could never tell when Verrox was attempting to be light-hearted.
‘I… always had him for the Chaplaincy,’ he said.
‘As did I. He thought too much.’
‘But he wanted to rule.’
‘Just what the Iron Council needs. Another thinker.’ Verrox stopped to punch an input code into a door hatch. It hissed open, releasing an unpleasant alchemical stink.
Lydriik took the opportunity to glance under the Iron Father’s shoulder.
The cell was relatively large, as befitted the title of Iron Father, and space was far from premium on a vehicle of Ruination’s scale. At most a hundred warriors called the fortress home, and there would be few mortal servants, discounting those that toiled at the bequest of the Adeptus Mechanicus in the enginarium subdecks. There was no pallet, no workbench, just a single rune display and a door that presumably led to an arming chamber. Only Verrox’s size made it feel cramped.
The Iron Father stepped inside and clumped slowly around. ‘Are you going to tell me what this is about or must I beat it from you?’
‘It is because of Thennos that I am here. I have been tracking the xenotechnology that Kristos and the Voice of Mars had attempted to conceal there.’
‘The worst-kept secret on Medusa, since the uprising,’ said Verrox. ‘The entire Iron Council knows there is something there.’
‘Was,’ Lydriik corrected.
He went on to tell of his efforts to track the technology down, culminating in his encounter with the Voice of Mars in the Meduson archives. The involvement of Harsid and Yeldrian, a child of the Raven and an alien, he thought best to keep to himself.
He drew a heavy siliceous key from the equipment pouch at his hip and showed it to Verrox.
‘Obtaining the information was not difficult, but it will take weeks to analyse it. Months. I am likely to be sent to Manga Unine to join my brothers in a day.’
‘Being out here on Ruination should buy you a day or two.’
Lydriik nodded. ‘But that’s not why I came.’
‘No?’
‘I have not the resources,’ said Lydriik. ‘And I have not the skills.’ He held up the key for Verrox. ‘And I have not the time.’
The Iron Father’s eyes focused on the key. Like all forty-one of the Chapter’s Iron Fathers Verrox had been a Techmarine, and even if he had never actively served in that capacity he had been inducted into the same circle of mysteries.
‘Palpus allowed you to walk free with that?’ he said.
‘They are highly compressed, compiled in some archival dialect I do not understand, and that is just the ones I can convince to open. He knows there is no way I can analyse a fraction of it before I am forced to leave Medusa.’
Verrox snorted. ‘Tech-priests believe the Omnissiah blessed them alone with an organ in their skulls.’ He opened an enormous hand and Lydriik gladly handed the key over. The Iron Father turned his back and inserted the key into the slot by his rune display.
‘It contains only the file descriptors,’ Lydriik explained. ‘The hard data is all aboard my Rhino. They were too bulky to bring over.’
Verrox was no longer listening.
He turned the key, the runebank emitting a chewing sound as it crunched on the data, numeric sequences piling into the graphical display. He punched in a complex string of commands and the numbers began to sort, scattering left and right over the wide screen. The sequences began to arrange themselves, aggregating into growing clumps either side of the midline. The Iron Father followed the sorting data as though watching a saint at work.
Sensing that he would get nothing further from Verrox now, Lydriik put his hand on his helmet and began to back out of the cell. ‘Leave a message with the Librarius when you have something. On my return from Manga Unine, I promise I will find the technology.’
‘It’s there.’
‘What?’ Lydriik stopped.
‘There.’ Verrox pointed to the tiny collection of sequences that made up the left-side clump. Data was still pouring out of Lydriik’s key and into the cogitator, but most of it was coming down on the right. Whatever that meant. The Iron Father snarled over his pauldron. ‘Never trust a priest that doesn’t believe you can think for yourself.’
‘What have you just done?’ asked Lydriik.
‘What do you know about file descriptors?’
Lydriik shrugged. ‘A run of numbers that leads into the body data. It’s meaningless, but each one is a unique sequence, so the archivists use them for sorting and archiving.’
Verrox nodded, mouth unzipping like a mountain lyger that had found a carcass outside its cave. ‘It’s random, but collate a number together, a few hundred thousand, and suddenly, not so random.’ He gestured to the rune display. ‘Particularly if they were all uploaded from the same location.’
‘You mean you…?’
Verrox jabbed a finger towards the larger data clump, the sudden motion causing servos to whir. ‘M
eduson.’ Then he indicated the various scattered sequences that had resisted his sorting algorithm. ‘Off-world, presumably.’
Lydriik stepped in closer, the rune display painting his upturned face green, and pointed at the smaller group of sequences. ‘So where is that?’
>>> HISTORICAL > THE BATTLE FOR FABRIS CALLIVANT, 212414.M41
Thirty-nine hours after their warp shadow first fell across the system’s edge, the orks’ ramshackle armada arrived at Fabris Callivant.
The dispersal pattern of the greenskin ships has been submitted to every rite of analysis known to the prognosticae and no coherence has ever been ascribed to their assault. They came at the planet and its aegis rings like a wave, a stampede, capital junks boosting ahead of their escorts in a headlong charge. Their massive prows were antlered wedges of scrap plating. Crude welding maligned the impression of horns, fangs and tusks, the paintwork a garish clash of colours presenting the Callivantine lines-of-battle with an onrushing horde of xenos deities and fungoid beasts.
The Imperial and Basilikon Astra fleets, by contrast, had barely moved in weeks. Fire protocols had been disseminated down the command chains days in advance of this moment. Every commander, from the lightest reconditioned frigate in Battlefleet Callivant to the Shield of the God-Emperor, knew exactly their place in the line.
The ‘honour’ of taking the first shot fell to the Mars-class battle cruiser Golden Ratio.
Grand Admiral Tigra Gorch had served out a working retirement in this Naval backwater with some dignity, if not distinction, enough to earn a marriage contract into House Callivant for his services. An insignificant niece, but females one hundred and two years a man’s junior with ties to a pre-Imperial dynasty were not, apparently, betrothed every day.
The blast of the battle cruiser’s nova cannon ignited a second sun, three hundred thousand kilometres above the planet’s surface.
The explosive power of twenty plasma warheads detonated under the front of the ork wave. Viewing oculi and auspectoriae of the heaviest battle cruisers would have bleached to white, while on lighter ships with less-significant shielding, sensoria units would have fizzled and popped. Living out its life cycle at relativistic speeds, the newborn star was entering its death stages even as the Golden Ratio’s drive stacks fired off to counter the cannon’s recoil. Logisters aboard squadron command ships tallied kills [LOST TO RECORD]. Aboard the Golden Ratio herself, pride of Battlefleet Callivant, the Grand Admiral’s chief of staff delivered a toast [ALSO, ALAS, LOST TO RECORD] to Gorch and his vessel’s honour.
But the battle was only just beginning.
Chapter Thirteen
‘No man of the Imperium shall fall to enemy hands. Not while a Hospitaller yet wields a blade.’
– Venerable Galvarro
I
The Venerable Augustin Sangreal Galvarro found the death of his enemies an uplifting experience. It brought him closer to the God-Emperor. An experience as near to true warmth as could penetrate the uterine tank where his limbless torso swam in cyborganic suspension. There were times, of course, when such pleasure had to be forgone, for the Emperor possessed enemies in multitude undeserving of the absolution that death by a crusader’s hand conferred. Not for the ork the mercy of his fists. No. Only a pitiless execution by laser lance or cyclonic warhead would do for such beasts.
The carillon bells mounted atop his sarcophagus jingled as the Shield of the God-Emperor shook. A purplish ripple of bruising filled the forward oculus as the starboard voids shunted the force of incoming ordnance into the warp. The gene-eunuchs in the tiered choirs about the bridge delivered a strident hymn of abjuration.
‘Permission to retaliate, Venerable?’
The Shield of the God-Emperor’s mortal shipmaster bowed at his feet. She was an elderly woman who had taken the crusade name Grace. Her double-breasted white jacket had scripture sewn into the cuffs and lapel, a golden cummerbund in the form of the aquila worn over the waist of a pair of brocade trousers.
‘Let the candles be lit.’
‘By your word, Venerable.’
She turned sharply and gave the command, one thousand serfs of the chapel illuminatus igniting tapers and setting them to black candles. The ritually prepared wicks fizzed before settling into a bright, white light.
‘Let us be the bearers of His light,’ Galvarro intoned.
‘By your example, Venerable.’ A nod to another crewman who deftly manipulated the dials and sliders of his runebank. Scores of powerful hull-mounted luminators beamed into space, hand-crafted filters in the form of martial saints and aquilae branding the foul alien that passed across their light.
‘The light in Him is the light in us. Let it burn the dark.’
‘By His will, Venerable.’
‘Ave Imperator.’
‘Ave Imperator!’
The thousands-strong bridge crew, choristers, serfs, armsmen, all delivered a thunderous rejoinder that would have been audible to Him on Terra. Galvarro shivered as the phantom sensation of metal, and its embossing scripture, brushed his shoulder. In his rapture, he had attempted to raise his hands, his mortal remains slapping feebly against the wall of his tomb.
Another shudder ran though the ship, a squeal as the impact force dispersed through her internal skeleton.
‘Now, Venerable?’
‘Now.’
Shipmaster Grace let out a breath, as though relieved, though clearly that could not be, for time given unto the Emperor was time given joyously.
‘Status of the Shield of the God-Emperor,’ he demanded.
‘Shield coverage of all quadrants. Engines on standby burn. Weapons loaded and charged, targeting matrices aligned.’
‘Alfaran?’
‘The Chapter Master and the Third stand ready on the embarkation decks.’
‘Good. And the fleet?’
‘Formation is holding. Battlefleet Callivant and the Basilikon Astra are at station keeping around the Darkward star fort and the orbital gun rigs. They’ve yet to engage. Battlefleets Dimmamar, Trojan and Warfleet Obscurus bear the brunt so far, but it won’t be long now.’
‘Our cousins in black?’
‘The Iron Hands…’ She pulled at her elaborate jacket cuffs. ‘I don’t know.’
Galvarro focused his vid-captors back onto the forward oculus. A wandering vertical of capture distortion marred his vision, but he had long ago made his peace with it, for through its signature oscillations did the Emperor, in His guise as the Omnissiah, impart foreknowledge upon this instrument of Man’s deliverance.
If he could but learn how to descry His words.
‘We are all His soldiers,’ he said.
‘As you bid, Venerable.’
‘Venerable!’ The call came from another serf who spun his chair to face his mortal superior and the Dreadnought that towered over her. ‘Urgent hail from the Euphrates.’ The Tyrant-class cruiser was a squadron flagship of Battlefleet Dimmamar, stationed in line-of-battle a few hundred kilometres forward of the Shield of the God-Emperor. The serf covered his headset with his hands, relaying the transmission even as it came in. ‘They’ve been boarded. The orks have taken a dozen decks and have the bridge besieged. They plead immediate assistance.’
‘And by the grace of the Golden Throne shall they receive it,’ said Galvarro. ‘Shipmaster.’
‘Your order, Venerable?’
‘Destroy the Euphrates.’
‘Yes, Venerable.’
Without pausing to question, the shipmaster relayed the order, watching as Galvarro watched, as the embattled cruiser disintegrated under the Shield of the God-Emperor’s firepower. She mouthed a prayer for forgiveness, though forgiveness was not what the Emperor provided.
‘Set course for where the xenos are thickest, and signal all Hospitallers vessels to match our heading.’
‘It will be so.’
‘No man of the Imperium shall fall to enemy hands,’ Galvarro announced, feeling the glorious mass of the Shield of the God-Emperor as it slowly began to move. ‘Not while a Hospitaller yet wields a blade.’
II
‘Compliance,’ said Draevark.
Sparks gouted from a tactical cogitator as Draevark relayed the magos’ coordinates to his crew. The bridge lit up momentarily. A battlefield illuminated by skyburst flares. Bodies lay in bloody pools, half buried under the emesis of overloaded bridge tech. Electricity crawled sporadically over crumpled bits of decking. Bent pipes spewed gas. Smoke hung heavy in the air, but the worst of the fires had been extinguished.
Most of his crew was already dead.
‘Three ork kroozers maintaining pursuit,’ one of them shouted.
A sudden impact hurled the unfortunate crewman from his standing station and onto a bracing spur that had fallen from the ceiling. The serf gasped, eyes rolling, as three metres of plasteel exploded from his chest. Astrogation erupted over the current helmsman.
Draevark watched the mortal writhe, faintly disgusted by the pink colour of the smoke he gave off as he burned and by the sweet stench of roasting meat.
‘Will no one enter my coordinates?’ he demanded, directing a spasm of power through his gauntlet.
A serf with a crude, three-pronged hook for a hand and blistered red skin who looked as though he had shaved in acid took the station.
