The Primarchs
Page 3
‘Behold a system I have designated as the Prismatica Cluster,’ said Fulgrim, as the holo zoomed towards the fifth world of the newly-named system. A haze of multi-coloured light surrounded the planet like a polar borealis effect, and as the image magnified still further, Lucius saw a world of overlapping bands of deep black and glittering diamond.
A number of orbitals followed the rotational axis of the planet, colossal freight handlers and processing stations with docking facilities for bulk carriers. Smudges of iron and steel indicated the presence of several such vessels, and pinpricks of winking lights spread between them were clearly defence platforms.
‘It is here I give you opportunity to prove your love for me as warriors of the Emperor’s Children,’ said Fulgrim, walking through the flickering projection and letting the holographic world bathe his flawless features in reflected starlight. ‘The lackeys of the Martian Priesthood work this world with their dull engines of construction, grubbing like savages in the soil for crystals to be shipped back to Mars.’
Scrolling lines of aestimare, yields and tithed tonnage slid around the image of the world in a noospheric ripple of light, and Lucius took a moment to scan them before becoming bored and concentrating on the glittering, reflective surface of the planet itself. Aside from a passing aesthetic appeal, it appeared to hold no real importance or strategic significance. He saw nothing to suggest this world was valuable enough to attract the attention of the primarch.
What was he was overlooking? What did Fulgrim see that he did not?
Perhaps the crystals were a raw material used in some vital manufacturing process? Lucius quickly dismissed the thought as irrelevant. That the Martian Priesthood valued them was reason enough to disrupt this Imperial operation, but it seemed a wretchedly backwater place to loose the strength of a Legion.
Fulgrim continued to stare at the gently revolving orb of Prismatica V, as though in serene thrall to the stark beauty of its glittering surface. His lips moved soundlessly, and he smiled at some secret joke or some particularly clever bon mot delivered to an unseen listener with perfect timing.
A petty thought occurred to Lucius, but he kept it to himself, knowing it would be unwise to speak it aloud. A similar thought evidently occurred to Eidolon, but the Lord Commander had not the common sense to keep his mouth shut.
‘My Lord, I do not understand,’ said Eidolon. ‘What purpose does this serve?’
Fulgrim rounded on Eidolon, the serenity of his pale features twisting in spiteful fury. He stalked towards Eidolon with murderous bile, and Lucius stepped quickly away lest he be caught in the hurricane of the primarch’s wrath. Fulgrim lashed out at Eidolon and the Lord Commander was hurled back like a swatted insect. He crashed down into the rubble left by the demolition of the tiered benches, his breastplate cracked wide and his taut skin spattered with blood.
‘You dare to question me?’ snapped Fulgrim, towering over the downed warrior.
‘No, my lord, I simply–’
‘Worm!’ screamed Fulgrim. ‘This is my desire and you question it?’
‘I–’
‘Quiet!’ raged Fulgrim, lifting the terrified Eidolon from the ground by the throat. Lucius felt a vicarious excitement at the sight of Eidolon’s humbling. He had seen Fulgrim crush the molten neck of an alien god in a fit of rage, and knew that Eidolon’s would present no challenge to his strength.
The fear in the Lord Commander’s face was very real and Lucius licked his lips at the thought of what a sublime sensation it must be to feel an emotion so alien to the Adeptus Astartes.
‘I am your lord and master and you insult me like this?’ said Fulgrim, his rage transformed into abject misery. ‘I deliver a war, and this is how you repay me, with questions and doubt? Is this campaign beneath you? Are you too good to make war at my command? Is that it?’
‘No!’ cried Eidolon. ‘I… I simply desired to know…’
‘To know what?’ spat Fulgrim, his anguish forgotten and his rage restored. ‘Speak, wretch! Out with it!’
Eidolon struggled in Fulgrim’s grasp, his face purpling to match the primarch’s armour. He gasped for breath, his genhanced physique no match for the strength of a primarch.
Between snatched breaths, Eidolon said, ‘Were we not ordered to Mars? Will this not delay our rendezvous with the Warmaster’s fleets?’
‘Horus is my brother, not my master, and I am not his to command,’ snarled Fulgrim, as though Eidolon had voiced the most heinous insult in mentioning the name of Horus Lupercal. ‘Who does he think he is to give me orders? I am Fulgrim! The Phoenician, and I am no man’s lapdog. If Horus thinks he can simply charge towards Terra like a blood-maddened berserker then he is a fool. One does not simply advance on the most heavily defended world in the galaxy; such a target must be taken with finesse. You understand?’
‘Yes, my lord,’ hissed Eidolon, but Fulgrim’s rage was not yet spent.
‘I know you, Eidolon, don’t think I don’t,’ said the primarch, dropping the choking Lord Commander and turning back to the image of the shimmering planet. ‘Always quick with a sniping comment, ever the whispered word in the shadows to undermine my authority. You are the worm at the heart of the apple, and I will have no one who doubts me at my back ready with a knife.’
Eidolon sensed the awful threat in Fulgrim’s words and dropped to his knees. ‘My lord, please!’ he begged. ‘I am loyal! I would never betray you!’
‘Betray me?’ said Fulgrim, whipping around and drawing the glitter-grey blade of the anathame. ‘You dare give voice to thoughts of betrayal? Here, in this gathering of my most loyal subjects? You are a bigger fool than I thought.’
‘No!’ shouted Eidolon, but Lucius knew he was wasting his breath.
To his credit, Eidolon saw it too and reached for his sword as Fulgrim stepped in to deliver the deathblow. The quillons of Eidolon’s sword had barely parted company with the lip of his scabbard when the anathame cut through his neck and sent his head flying through the air. It landed with a meaty thud on the terrazzo floor and rolled until it finally came to rest against one of the urns of victory wine.
The Lord Commander’s eyes blinked once, his lips drawn back over his splintered teeth in an expression of horror that made Lucius want to laugh. Fulgrim turned from Eidolon’s corpse as it slumped to the ground, and retrieved the head he had cut from the Lord Commander’s body. Blood ran in a viscous stream from the severed neck and Fulgrim walked the circumference of the chamber, allowing coagulating droplets to fall in the opened casks of victory wine.
‘Drink, my children,’ he said as though what had just happened was a minor thing. ‘Fill your chalices and drink to the great victory I give you. We will make war on Prismatica and show the Warmaster how this campaign should be waged!’
The Emperor’s Children surged forwards, each eager to be the first to drink the primarch’s gift to them. Still clutching Eidolon’s head, Fulgrim ascended the plinth to his throne and spread the golden weave of his cloak behind him before sitting. He looked down on his warriors, his gaze at once indulgent and faintly condescending.
Lucius thought back to the way Fulgrim had moved as he drew his sword and cut Eidolon’s head from his body. With the eye of a master swordsman, he analysed every movement the primarch’s body had made, his stepped lunge, the turn of his shoulder and the pivot of the hips as he struck.
One movement had flowed into another, as if no other could ever have been possible. The primarch’s flawless body was always in balance, yet Lucius saw something no one but the greatest living mortal swordsman could ever have seen, and it gave him a delicious thrill of excitement and disappointment.
It was an impossible thought, a treasonous thought, but Lucius couldn’t help but follow it through to its logical conclusion.
I could beat you, thought Lucius. If you and I fought right now, I would kill you.
4
These men were brutes, crudely enhanced to be bigger and stronger than most mortals, but there was little subtlety to their power. Anyone could pump a man full of growth chemicals and graft a host of combat augmetics to his frame, but what good was that if they were not trained in their use?
A weaponised servitor creature encased in azure war plate and bearing little that could be called organic came at him. Its shoulder mounted cannon spat a torrent of shells, tearing up shards of glassy, volcanic stone, but Lucius was already moving. He rolled beneath the blitz of fire, slicing away the furiously rotating barrels of the gun and lancing his Terran blade through a thin gap in the abdominal armour plates.
Oily black blood sprayed from the wound like pressurised hydraulic fluid, and Lucius spun inside the reach of its remaining arm. The snapping, energy-wreathed lifter claw slashed low, and Lucius used the arm as a springboard. He vaulted onto a projecting stub of armour plating at the servitor’s hip and somersaulted onto its wide shoulders. The silver Laer blade stabbed down into the construct’s armoured skull, and Lucius felt something wet and living burst apart inside. He vaulted from the dying servitor’s body, pleased to see red wetness on the blade of his sword.
The bio-machine staggered, but did not fall, though it was clear it was dead.
Lucius paused in his killing to flick the blood from his swords as a thunderous detonation mushroomed into the sky with concussive force. A petrochemical stink filled the air as the unrefined promethium burned off and mingled with the fluorocarbon-rich atmosphere to form a potent breath that gave Lucius a momentary flush of pleasurable dizziness.
Emperor’s Children swarmed around him, shooting with abandon into the mass of fighting warriors. What had begun as a carefully orchestrated act of mass murder had become a screaming free for all. Hundreds of augmented warriors protected the main refineries and processing plants, but they had no chance of survival. Three companies of Emperor’s Children had fallen on the defenders of Prismatica, and there would be no survivors.
Though he had been careful not to let any hint of his true feelings show, Lucius was forced to agree with the late Lord Commander Eidolon’s assessment of this venture. It had taken the fleet, led by Andronius and Pride of the Emperor, a mere ten hours to batter a path through the picket line of system monitors and cripple the last defence orbital. Three bulk carriers had been captured, kilometres-long behemoths loaded with billions of tonnes of shimmering, reflective crystals.
With orbital space secure, hunting squadrons of Stormbirds had descended on the main manufactories at the southern tip of a vast forest of towering crystal spires and the slaughter had begun. The Mechanicum facility was burning, aflame from end to end as the Emperor’s Children ran rampant through its vast storage silos and hangar-sized refining structures. Vast drilling engines towered above the battling figures, tall augers and serrated drilling arms raised to the sky like the limbs of praying mantises.
Marius Vairosean led his company of shrieking Kakophoni against the western flank of the facility, systematically razing its defences with grim, methodical dogma. Shrieking harmonics of dissonant vibrations echoed from the iron canyons between the towering structures as monstrous sonic weapons tore the atoms of matter apart with resonant frequencies that echoed between worlds.
Buildings collapsed like paper, and coruscating sound waves tore deep gouges in the basalt rock of the planet. The screams of the dying mingled with the musical crescendo of clashing sound waves, a howling symphony of destruction that brought the rapturous madness of the Maraviglia to mind.
Lucius had kept well clear of Marius Vairosean, for the Kakophoni were now virtually deaf and insensate to any but the most ear-splitting noises. A swordsman needed perfect hearing and his inner ear to be flawless. The nerve-shredding rush of excruciatingly vivid sound was simply a pleasure he would have to forego.
Fulgrim himself led the main thrust of the assault into the heart of the Mechanicum defenders, surrounded by hulking Terminators of the Phoenix Guard. Julius Kaesoron fought next to him, bludgeoning a path through the cohorts of weaponised servitors and phalanxes of skitarii that held the chokepoints with an array of automated gun platforms.
Against the brute force of the Phoenician and Kaesoron’s warriors, they had no chance. A primarch was an unstoppable force of destruction and Terminator armour made a warrior nigh invincible. Even those warriors who suffered wounds found that their agony only spurred them to greater heights of ecstasy.
Fulgrim was magnificent, a towering avatar of beauty and death, his golden cloak spread behind him and reflecting the variegated sunlight in rainbow arcs of dazzling brightness. His armour shone like a beacon, and where he walked, his grey sword clove through hybrid flesh and iron without pause. He sang as he slew, an aching lament from lost Chemos that spoke of beauty’s end and a lost love that can never come again.
More beautiful than anything Coraline Aseneca had sung, it seemed perverse that the machine men dying around him could not appreciate the wonder that surrounded them and the glory of the one who stooped to take their lives. They were dying without knowing how they were honoured and Lucius hated them for that.
Smoke coughed from the interior of a burning refinery, and Lucius howled in frustration as his view of Fulgrim at war was hidden behind a bank of black and violet clouds. He turned from the battles being fought elsewhere, back to his own arena of death.
Fulgrim had entrusted the eastern flank to him, and he had led his warriors in a series of daring feints that drew the enemy from their defensive formations in prosaically predictable ways. One by one, each counterattack had been beheaded until the defensive line had been bled dry and Lucius’s warriors had advanced without meeting any real resistance. He wove a red and silver path through the defences, encircling each pocket of resistance and despatching its most promisingly threatening warrior with a flourish of breathtaking skill and spite.
He vaulted onto the remains of a toppled battle engine, a ten-metre-high biped with its princeps compartment breached and pink amniotic gel drooling from the cracked cockpit. Lucius had seen the machine stomp from an armoured hangar at the edge of the defences and briefly considered taking it on. His colossal vanity had intervened, and he had laughed the idea away. Only a fool would dare face such a machine alone, and it had fallen in the crossfire of sonic cannons before it had taken a dozen paces.
Lucius thrust his sword to the scintillating sky, striking an appropriately heroic pose for his warriors to see.
‘Onwards! Into the fires and we will show these mechanised men the meaning of pain!’
No sooner had he shouted than the curtain of smoke parted and a thunderous crash of heavy footsteps shook the ground. High above Lucius, a snarling, bestial head emerged from the smoke. Worked in bronze to resemble a hunting mastiff, the battle engine’s armoured cockpit was hung with thermal-gusted banners, and the grey and tan carapace boasted a golden eagle and crossed swords emblem.
The towering battle engine emerged from the ruins of the factory, and Lucius felt a wonderfully unexpected jolt of terror as it stalked towards its downed brother.
‘Ah, yes,’ said Lucius. ‘They hunt in pairs.’
The battle engine’s arms swung up to fire, clattering as auto-loaders drove heavy-calibre shells into the breeches of monstrously oversized guns. Lucius stood defiantly atop the broken carapace of the Titan’s brother, leaping clear as its weapons fired with the deafening thunder of a thousand hammers beating at a war god’s anvil. He rolled as he hit the ground, momentarily blinded by the hurricane of stone splinters, dust and propellant gases.
A flaming pyre of wreckage blazed brightly behind him, and he sprang to his feet as he saw the blackened outline of the battle engine silhouetted against the flames. Its head bobbed low, as though hunting his scent, and Lucius tightened his grip on his swords.
The guns roared again, and Emperor’s Children warriors vanished in a spraying blitz of shells that churned the ground to splintered rock. Armour disintegrated under the barrage, flesh vaporised, and the screams of the dying were musical, pain-filled and short.
Return fire sprayed the Titan, its shields sparking and flaring with bright squalls of energy discharge. Heavier impacts tore gouges in the invisible energy, like stones hurled into fluorescing water. A missile streaked towards the Titan and the warhead exploded with a red bloom of superheated plasma. Shrieking frequencies ripped the air, but still the shield held; though Lucius knew it must be close to collapse.
‘Over here, you bastard!’ he shouted, enjoying the mix of wild emotions surging through his body. The modifications Apothecary Fabius had worked on his nervous system responded to the powerful stimulus and rewarded him with a heady cocktail of pleasure responders and hormonal boosters. In an instant, Lucius became faster, stronger and hyper-sensitive to his environment.
Its mastiff head swung to face him and its war horn loosed a screaming howl born of rage and grief. Lucius matched its braying fury with a roar of his own, daring it to come and fight him. His suddenly enhanced senses took in a thousand tiny details in an instant; the fine texture of its metal skin, the cursive gusts of smoke from its weapons, the glint of colourful light on the red cockpit panes, the dripping of coolant gases from the machinery concealed beneath its carapace, and the bitter, iron flavour of the sentience at its heart.