He didn’t ask why she’d done it. Perhaps because it didn’t matter, perhaps because he knew why. The Conqueror couldn’t – wouldn’t – be separated from its queen.
In lieu of useless accusations, he laughed wetly, gargling on his own gore.
‘A m-murderess,’ he said, ‘but our murderess. A rose wuh-watered with blood.’
Gorechild, Khârn’s axe, lifted high. Lotara halted him with a gesture. A captain should do the difficult duties. It was her place to punish mutiny.
‘No,’ she said in the wake of Skane’s last words. ‘Let me.’
She levelled her pistol, taking aim at Skane’s one eye. There was no anger on her face, and no hate in her heart, but she still pulled the trigger.
The Conqueror opened fire. Four of the five shuttles between the flagship and the distant Bestiarius ceased to exist, detonating in momentary flashes: final sensory flickers of influence, last imprints of light in a galaxy that was done with them.
No supplies were lost in the executions. Lotara and Khârn had arranged everything meticulously in that regard. The supply shuttles were all empty but for their cargo of mutineers and servitor pilots. No one of consequence was lost in the annihilation. All had gone as planned.
The captain of the Conqueror leaned forward in her throne. One shuttle remained. One shuttle that was hailing them. The last shuttle to launch.
‘Do you wish to respond, ma’am?’ the vox-officer asked.
Lotara hadn’t decided.
Khârn stood by her throne, knuckles twitching, salivating from the edge of his mouth. Skane’s blood was still on his face and chest-plate. He watched the debris from the dead shuttles scatter in the void, the last vestiges of treachery dispersing into blackness.
From somewhere deeper, much deeper, in the ship, a tremulous roar sounded out. A cry of victory, formed in the throat of something that had never been truly human and, in recent months, had only fallen further from humanity.
‘Angron compliments you,’ Khârn observed, dead-eyed and distracted. ‘As always. He says… He says you served him well.’
Lotara said nothing.
‘Were you truly not tempted to leave?’ Khârn turned to her. She could feel his eyes on her now. ‘Not even once?’
Lotara lifted her eyes to his. ‘Do you remember that insipid poetry the remembrancers used to write about me? The flowery piss they’d scrawl down. The stuff that was always lapped up on Terra.’
Khârn’s laughter was somewhere between a snort and a growl. ‘Oh, yes.’
Lotara leaned back in her throne, her eyes thoughtful. In the silence that followed, Khârn sucked air through his teeth, reclaiming a trickle of his drool. His armour joints grumbled as he inclined his head to the last shuttle’s silhouette on the oculus.
‘Shall we hear what Maruuk has to say?’
‘If we must.’ She signalled her vox-officer to allow the contact. A grunting, vicious voice boomed over the bridge’s speakers.
‘You wretched, filthy–’ Maruuk began.
‘Yes, yes,’ Lotara said over him. ‘Very interesting. Spare me the indignation, traitor.’
‘Skane was a fool to trust you.’
‘He was indeed,’ Lotara allowed. ‘But he was brave to the end, dying a warrior’s death. He didn’t scamper up the gang-ramp and squeal like livestock as he fled.’
‘Tell me why you betrayed us,’ Maruuk demanded. All too easy to imagine him twitching and flinching as he snarled the words, at the mercy of foul brain chemistries. ‘Why do you want to remain on that ship?’
‘Skane didn’t need to ask that question,’ Lotara replied. ‘Can it be that a radiation-soaked, half-mad, half-dead Destroyer had more insight than a company captain? Maybe the Legion will do better without you.’
‘Your insults mean nothing, mortal.’
Lotara sighed. ‘The answer is obvious, Maruuk, and you have a couple of seconds left to reach the revelation on your own. Farewell.’
She nodded to the three thralls at the weapons console, giving the signal to fire. The ship shivered as the prow lances opened up, and the open vox-link dissolved into immediate static.
She answered the dead man’s question anyway, reflectively, speaking the words as she’d spoken them a thousand times since taking the black throne aboard this cursed ship.
‘No one runs from the Conqueror.’
IV
‘…and worshipful foes
Awarded medals carved upon flesh
In scars of shrapnel
And sourceless fire.
This flock
Her flock
Unburied
Within great drifting tombs
Of silent enemy iron.’
– excerpt from A Rose Watered with Blood
By the remembrancer saga-poet Eurykidas DeMartos
(deceased)
About the Author
Aaron Dembski-Bowden is the author of the Horus Heresy novels The Master of Mankind, Betrayer and The First Heretic, as well as the novella Aurelian and the audio drama Butcher’s Nails, for the same series. He has also written the Warhammer 40,000 novel Spear of the Emperor, the popular Night Lords series, the Space Marine Battles book Armageddon, the novels The Talon of Horus and Black Legion, the Grey Knights novel The Emperor’s Gift and numerous short stories. He lives and works in Northern Ireland.
An extract from Heralds of the Siege.
The Martian soil trembled. Beneath the Temple-Tarantyne assembly yards, something was rising.
Once a glorious spectacle of magna-machinery and Titan production, the southern installation had produced the mighty god-machines of the Legio Excruciata. Now its great production temples glowed with the unholy light of corruption. Chittering constructs went to work on towering perversions – looming monstrosities that should have been Warlord Titans but instead were metal monsters of daemonic infestation and heretek weaponry.
Row upon row of such beasts stood silent in the storage precincts, waiting for the orbital mass conveyers that would take them to bulk freighters destined for the Warmaster’s forces.
But those mass conveyors would not come.
With the Forge World Principal blockaded by the VII Legion, nothing was leaving Mars. Like the monstrous tanks, fevered warrior-constructs and ranks of empty battleplate sitting in storage bays across the surface, the Chaos Titans gathered Martian dust.
Dust that now rained down about the towering abominations as the bedrock quaked beneath them.
A Warlord Titan was a walking fortress of thick plate and powerful shielding. As any who had ever faced such an apocalyptic foe understood, it had few weaknesses. As a former princeps of the Collegia Titanica, Kallistra Lennox had the distinction of both piloting and felling such god-machines. She knew that one of the few vulnerabilities the Mars Alpha-pattern Warlord had was a weak point on its command deck, but the deck was almost impossible to reach for ground troops.
Standing in the gyroscopic interior compartment of the Mole burrowing transport Archimedex, Lennox felt the adamantium prow drilling a phase-fielded tunnel through the Martian bedrock and soil, then finally breaking the surface into the assembly yards. While the large tunnelling vehicle emerged upright, like a rising tower, the crowded troop compartment maintained its rolling orientation within, which would make disembarkation a smooth affair. The princeps had directed the translithope to rise up next to a Warlord Titan identified as Ajax Abominata. Loyal constructs had been watching the installation for weeks from the scrap-littered sides of the surrounding mountains. The construction of Ajax Abominata was all but complete, although its armoured shell was still covered in a scaffold, complete with mobile gantries.
It was a target ripe for sabotage – and the princeps knew exactly how to do it.
Not that she looked very much like an officer of the Collegia Titanica any more. Wh
ile she still wore her uniform amid scraps of flak and carapace, it was tattered and stained with oil. The black leather of her boots was scuffed and her gloves crudely cut to fingerlessness. She wore an eyepatch where her ocular bionic had been torn out, and a short chainblade sat heavy upon her belt where a ceremonial sabre used to hang. Grenades and hydrogen flasks dangled from a bandolier while in her hands the princeps clutched the chunky shape of a plasma caliver.
‘Stand by,’ she said, sternly.
The loyalist Mechanicum cell to which Lennox belonged had been dubbed the Omnissian Faithful. Like all its adherents, Lennox was a Martian survivor. Left behind in the exodus to Terra, she had become a rebel on her own world. While the scrapcode tore through the Forge World Principal, corrupting everything it touched, there had been some Martians and constructs who had followed their instincts. As part of a disgust response – like a person making themselves sick after ingesting a toxin or poison – some true servants of the Omnissiah had had the strength to mutilate themselves. They tore bionics from their bodies, severed hardlinks and burned out wireless receivers. Ports and interfaces were gouged out, their bodies and minds cut off from the code-streams of the Martian networks. They had saved themselves from the infected data that brought madness, spiritual pollution and the warping of flesh and form.
It was a corruption that had claimed nearly all who had not escaped the Red Planet, even the Fabricator General himself: Kelbor-Hal, now no more than a withered bundle of polluted workings. Like the magi below him and the constructs below them, he had become a slave to darkness. A puppet controlled by the renegade Warmaster Horus, light years distant.
In the Mole’s troop compartment stood a motley collection of blank-faced adepts, battle-smashed skitarii, liberated tech-thralls, indentured menials, gun-servitors saved by their masters, vat-engineered work-hulks, harnessed ferals and bastardised battle-automata. All were pledged to the Omnissian Faithful but had needed a leader in the field. Someone of a tactical mind and destructive disposition to help the rebels in a campaign of sabotage and subversion.
When Lennox had joined them, they had found just such a leader.
‘Ten seconds,’ the princeps told the rebel constructs about her. Her seconds, Omnek-70 and Galahax Zarco, waited either side of the bulkhead. Omnek-70 was skitarii – a Ranger who carried the length of a transuranic arquebus. Zarco, meanwhile, was a hulking enginseer who hefted a power axe in the shape of an Omnissian cog. Lennox listened for the sound of the drill and phase fields on different materials. She stamped on the deck.
‘Ratchek,’ she called to her former moderatii and the Mole’s goggled operator. ‘Kill the main drive. Open outer doors.’
The layered bulkheads sighed hydraulically, and slipped aside to reveal the shadowy interior of the scaffold complex.
Lennox nodded. ‘Go.’
Click here to buy Heralds of the Siege.
A Black Library Publication
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.
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