Heralds of the Siege

by Nick Kyme

 

  Above him the void shields sparked and pulsed as a black rain began to fall. In the distance the clouds were pulsing red. He could feel the links to those under his command vanishing just as the storm clouds blew closer. The world felt as though it were shrinking, its data erased. He reflected on the possibilities: an atmospheric weapon of some kind, possibly combined with a rare variety of data-phage.

  The bolt of lightning struck the void shield above. The world flashed white as a layer of energy collapsed. The storm was on them now, racing across the sky to swallow the daylight. He and his cohorts were alone in the gloom.

  Another lightning bolt struck the void shields, and then another, and another, like a hammer striking down from the sky. The domes of energy shattered.

  Kadith braced for weapons fire, for the scream of gunships and the coming of the Warmaster.

  The rain continued to fall. The carapaces of the automata chimed as the drops struck. Kadith looked at the liquid running off them, and across the ground. It was not black as he had first thought. It was red. Thick, wet, red.

  The figures came from the storm front in a rush. Kadith had seconds to catch sight of teeth and stretched bodies of flayed muscle as the howling tide broke.

  ‘Kill protocol!’ shouted Kadith in his false true voice.

  The automata and myrmidons fired. Bodies exploded into clouds of red slime. Plasma turned hides of brass into molten spray. Beams of light sliced through packs of skinless hounds. Kadith’s senses were filled with static and distortion.

  But the horde kept coming. Red liquid coated the ground and every figure. The world was crimson and burning. To his right, a creature with spider legs and a torso of brass and muscle shrieked, and charged towards a siege automaton. Flesh and machine met. Pistons rammed forwards. Claws of bone shattered armour plates. Corrupted data battered across Kadith’s senses. Half his mind was trying to correlate the patterns of battle, trying to coordinate movement and fire.

  A figure plunged from the storm clouds. Fire roared from its mouth, and smoke spilled from its wings. It landed before Kadith, the ground shattering beneath its hooves. It whirled as it rose, wings and axe and jaws scything through Kadith’s guard.

  Rounds rang off the creature’s hide. Kadith took a step backwards, stabilised his frame and aimed his weapons. The power built in the charge chambers as the creature loomed above him, blood and flame scattering from it as it took a slow step towards him. The charge in his weapons reached maximum. His vision was a fog of static, but somehow he could still see the creature, as though he were not seeing it with his eyes. Its jaws lolled open. A dog’s smile of teeth and hunger.

  Kadith fired, and the creature leapt forwards, its wings a canopy spread against the storm, its axe a red edge cutting down.

  Storms swallowed the sphere of Accazzar-Beta. Argonis watched them spread across the planet as it turned beneath the Vengeful Spirit. It had been only an hour since the Warmaster had returned from the planet’s surface, and in that time the planet had changed.

  Red streaks ran through the clouds, growing brighter and broader. Vast webs of lightning branched across the storms, running on and on and then suddenly fading. The light lingered in Argonis’ eyes, and he thought that he heard a shriek of thunder even though kilometres of vacuum separated him from the storms.

  ‘Beautiful, is it not?’ said Horus. ‘At least, after a fashion.’

  Horus stepped up to the viewport. Argonis felt his skin prickle. He did not want to look up from the dying world before him, though. He did not want to look at the Warmaster.

  ‘You asked a question when this began, my son,’ said Horus. ‘Do you still wish an answer?’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘Because I can. Because I must.’

  ‘And what do you wish me to do with that knowledge, my lord?’

  Horus turned from the viewport as lightning clawed the surface of the red clouds.

  ‘I wish you to carry its truth with you.’

  The Court of the Governor of the Gilded Worlds

  ‘And now, Desigus, Lord of the Gilded Worlds, and Warden of the Aventian Gulf, you have heard my words, and must now choose what fate you wish for the world you guard.’

  Desigus stares at Argonis, his already pale face leeched of colour.

  ‘It… it is not possible… It cannot be…’

  ‘I am not here to convince you,’ says Argonis, with the smallest of shrugs. ‘I am here only to ask if you comply with the will of the Warmaster.’ He pauses, then asks the question he bears like a drawn sword. ‘What is your answer?’

  The Warmaster, Horus, on the bridge of the Vengeful Spirit

  DUTY WAITS

  Guy Haley

  The Anterior Wall, Gate Anterior Six. Dorn’s fortress is new on Terra’s aged terms, but already the acids of the air and rain have eaten into it, pocking it rough as wave-worn rock. The erosion is getting worse. The processes the Emperor set in motion to clean the toxins from the air have halted. After a period of hopeful remission, Terra’s long illness has returned. Sacrificed to the exigencies of war, the regeneration of mankind’s home world has halted.

  A column of warriors in yellow armour march upon the wall. The Imperial Fists are on patrol. There are five hundred of them, a company, with all their attendant officers. At their head is their captain, Maximus Thane.

  Cold Himalazian winds cut across a wall-walk large enough for a squadron of tanks to ride down five abreast. In the upper reaches, where the Palace has smothered Earth’s highest peaks, it is snowing dirty flakes flecked with the smuts of industry. On the lower ramparts there is only rain. Once, these lands were dry, high plateaus; now they are a Palace larger than a city. Emissions from its lofty towers create their own storms. Atmospheric regulators spew steam into the sky. Artificial clouds rapidly become rain in the chill, thin air. None of it blesses the torrid earth. The rain runs into drains and thence into funnels that take it down into the spaces between the Palace’s cellars and the hidden bedrock. All the water is sucked back up by the Palace, to be used again and again.

  Between the dark clouds, the sky is a sickly vanilla shade. It is a bruise gone past its worst lividity. Ordinarily the armour of the giants stamping along the wall is a rich gold, far cleaner than the ailing skies, a yellow as bright as Terra’s extinct wildflowers. The quality of the sun desaturates the hue of their armour until it is a leper’s pallor. When the clouds scud over the sun, it becomes a murky green.

  The wind carries the rain in steeply. In eddies created by angles in the wall, it turns in soaking gyres. The water runs over the armour, gathering in corners, streaking eye-lenses, pouring over their emblems of a black fist upon a white field. Both seem grey in the rain.

  The Imperial Fists march relentlessly. Their armour is impervious to energy blast, explosion and the void. Mere weather is of no concern to the Legiones Astartes. They must move fast, for they have a lot of ground to cover.

  The Anterior Wall is a loop, a rope of stone, rockcrete, plasteel and adamantium, tossed out to snare a great swathe of territory and steal it into the Palace’s embrace. It forms a bailey, though one built to the scale of titans rather than men. Behind the Anterior Wall, the Lion’s Gate let into the Eternity Wall. Whereas the Anterior Wall is only stupendous in scale, the Lion’s Gate defies human senses. There are mountains smaller than the gatehouse. Though more than three hundred kilometres from the Anterior Wall, it is clearly visible. Even through the rain, it is a squat, brooding shadow.

  The Lion’s Gate is not these Space Marines’ concern. Others of their Legion man its guns and its parapets. Their duty is on the Anterior Wall, and true to the nature of their kind, they give it their complete attention – rain, dirt and all. No place in the Palace is safe. The enemy could come at any time. The enemy have already attacked. Since the Alpha Legion’s assault on Terra, the praetorians of the Emperor have been vigilant.

 
; There are six gates that pierce the wall’s frontage. They are each one hundred and forty-three kilometres apart. The wall itself is nine hundred and fifty kilometres long, though if one were to draw a straight line between the two points where it joins the Eternity Wall, the distance would be only three hundred and ninety-six kilometres.

  The Space Marines doggedly tramp along. Their pace does not vary, but remains a jog that an unmodified human could not possibly match. They do it for hours, for kilometre after kilometre, thundering past the unblinking eyes of picters, through the spread nets of motion sensors, their patrol logged by every one. To their left the outer ward of the Palace spreads itself across the ground. The buildings there are strategically unimportant, else they would be within the Eternity Wall. Civilian abodes. Offices for non-hegemony organisations. Corporate interests, trade cartel headquarters, charitable foundations, places of education. All the usual trappings of human society. But most of the concerns sheltering in the Anterior loop have either been shut down or subordinated to the growing Imperial bureaucracy. There has never been a state of war like this in all of mankind’s history. Freedom is ever the first casualty of war, and it has been lost notably quickly this time.

  The company approaches a bastion athwart the walk, where a lesser wall projects inwards for a dozen kilometres, concealing what lies beyond. A roaring of engines and the lights of void ships climbing skywards indicates where they are. The Imperial Fists slow and come to a halt in perfect formation. The rain drums off their armour. Yellow armour in yellow gloom.

  Their leader marches to the gate let into the tower. It is thirty metres high and fifteen wide. Automated guns track him as he approaches the sentry post set into the plascrete next to the gate. The post is a cylinder as tall as a mortal human. The cylinder swivels on soundless bearings, opening itself to reveal a half-man meshed with electronics housed inside. The rain spatters his pallid skin.

  The captain addresses the servitor.

  ‘Thane, Maximus. Twenty-Second Captain, Imperial Fists Twenty-Second Company, Second Chapter. Personal ident VII-22-Alpha-Alpha-7709231.’

  The Imperial Fists are forced to do this every time they pass a bastion. Treachery brings fear of more treachery. Infiltrators have already breached the Palace once. Lord Rogal Dorn will not have it happen again. Every warrior must present his credentials, no matter his rank. ‘Watchword for today is Europa.’

  ‘Ident accepted. Watchword accepted,’ says the half-man. His lips are sutured shut, and the mechanisms of speech have been excised from his throat. The voice is mechanical, and issues from a panel over his head. A broad-spread, low-power laser fans out from a lens over the door, measuring every aspect of Thane’s armour. Simultaneously, cogitators within the building link with Thane’s suit and interrogate it independently, reviewing pict data and demanding passwords of their own that only the battleplate’s machine-spirit knows. Above, on the wall, are more warriors of the VII Legion. They are from another company, and ordered to shoot anyone on sight that appears suspicious. Thane knows they will kill him if he so much as hesitates in delivering the passcodes.

  ‘Remove your helm,’ says the half-man.

  Thane complies. Air pressure equalises with a hiss. Cold rain runs down his face. His left eye is momentarily dazzled by a retinal scan. A needle tastes the blood of his cheek.

  ‘Maximus Thane identification completed. You may pass, captain,’ says the voice.

  The lights on an access panel beside the servitor cycle as it contacts devices buried under kilometres of stone. It chimes. Locking teeth clunk into their housings. The gate slides back, revealing a two-and-a-half-metre thickness of metal on toothed tracks, slick with grease that is soon beaded with the rain. Like the wall, the gate is barely a few years old, but already it is pitted. Thane passes through. The first of his officers advances to the servitor and repeats the process. Each of them has their own watchword.

  A tunnel passes through the bastion. Guns track Thane every step of the way. At the far end is a second gate, where he undergoes a duplicate of the password process. The far gate opens, then closes behind him. Getting his men through will take an hour. There are dozens more towers like this they must negotiate. Every patrol has to undergo the same. The wall is never empty for longer than fifteen minutes. Thousands of checks are made every hour. It has to be this way. The Alpha Legion showed them that.

  Thane takes a moment for himself and goes to the wall’s inner edge. Both sides of the wall-walk have a crenellated parapet. Risky, in a fortress, for a covered rear facing allows an enemy that captures the wall to turn it to his own protection, but there is a good reason for it.

  Much of the Anterior loop is occupied by the Lion’s Gate Spaceport. The artificial plains of its landing fields stretch from the Anterior Wall to the Eternity Wall, filling the space entirely. Thane ponders the monumental efforts required to build the port. A subsidiary Himalazian mountain range was levelled to accommodate it. It is perfectly flat and currently occupied by hundreds of enormous landers. Ground vehicles speed along its road grid, lights blinking. Ships take off and land in constant cycle. The wall shakes as one lifts off near Thane’s position, burning oceans of fuel to haul its bulk out of Terra’s gravity well.

  He watches its slow progress to orbit. His eyes are drawn to the heavens, which heave with the false stars of spacecraft and high-anchor orbitals.

  Where will Horus strike first, he thinks, when he finally comes into the system? Will he stop at Mars to tip the civil war there in his favour? Will they fall upon Luna, to neutralise the defence stations? Will they make a direct attack?

  The situation appears hopeless. Those loyal to the Emperor are outnumbered and scattered. It does not matter that Lord Dorn has been joined by his brothers Leman Russ, Jaghatai Khan and lately Sanguinius upon Terra. It appears a mighty force, but all their Legions have been mauled. Dorn’s other loyal siblings are scattered across the galaxy. A little hope has filtered down into the populace at the four’s gathering, at the abatement of the warp storm and the arrival of reinforcements from across the Imperium. Thane does not share it. He has a fine strategic mind. The odds are stacked against Terra. He believes something terrible, though he does not want to, and tries hard to change his opinion. But he cannot. He believes that Horus will win.

  Time ticks on. Terra has been waiting for years for the attack. The fortress has been ready for months, the battlefield is set.

  Still the enemy does not come.

  Nearly two thousand kilometres away, in a tower facing towards sunset, another of Dorn’s sons performs his repetitive labours. It would take a month of ceaseless marching to get to this other place from Thane’s position, but unbelievably the fortifications are the same. The wall is part of the same defence system. The road atop it is the same road. A man could walk between the two places uninterrupted, save for Lord Dorn’s multiple layers of security.

  The name of this second Imperial Fist is Kolo. Only Kolo; if he once had another name, he does not remember it. The Legion recruiters did not mark one down. Like many of his kind he recalls little of his origins, though sometimes he has flashes of hot nights and hotter days. The burnt-sugar shade of his skin and his accent marks him out as a native of Mid-Afrik. The rest of his past has been wiped away by the Emperor’s gifts. He is Terran, he knows that, one of many recruited when the warp storm made transit to Inwit impossible. It is only two years since his admittance to the Legion, but he has already forgotten who he was.

  The wall is called the Dusk Wall. Kolo is deep inside it, ninety metres beneath the surface, under layered plascrete, ferrocrete and rockcrete. The walls are riddled with cysts of reactive liquid plasteks and braided cables of adamantium wire. Kolo is within a gallery lit by orange screen glow. The cathode screens in the gallery are deliberately primitive electronics that are easy to produce and resistant to enemy subversion. The great sciences of the Imperium have been bypassed in favour of robust simplicity. This change in attitude, though expedient, will co
st mankind in the years to come.

  Kolo was raised in the hope of defeating mankind’s extra-terrestrial foes, but his dreams of fighting for a greater future remain unrealised. Kolo has never left Terra. In the stead of alien nightmares, he faces the horror of fighting those he should have named brother.

  ‘Anything?’ Kolo asks. For the baseline humans he commands, his moods are difficult to read. His features are blocky on a square face not designed to convey emotion. Even so, his hopefulness is apparent. It has been a long wait. He wishes to fight.

  ‘Nothing, my lord Imperial Fist,’ says the individual manning the station. The flickering lines of ray-painted light on the glass remain devoid of content. There is a sole block of text at the top containing the operator’s details. There are no messages beneath that, no picts of invading fleets, no radar or augur returns. The orange-and-black screen is void of data as the sky is void of foes. There is only a blinking cursor beneath the man’s digitised identity. Nothing else.

  ‘Inform me as soon as you have anything,’ Kolo says, words he has said a thousand times in the last two months. He moves on down the rows of operatives.

  Kolo is a line trooper, the lowest rank of legionary. Yet the Praetorian’s sons are so thinly spread across the fortress-Palace, many have duties that exceed their rank. His task, for the moment, is to act as a link between the fortress’ eyes and its armaments.

  One day, Kolo will bear the name Bulwark for his actions in the siege. He will earn it for the acts he will perform upon the wall in the months to come. He will be dauntless, implacable. That day is far ahead of him. And though he will be reckoned a hero, he will find no glory in the name’s earning. He will yearn for the boredom of the instrument gallery before the end.

  He stops again by another operative.

  ‘Anything from the outer system?’

  ‘Nothing, my lord,’ says the man. ‘I will inform you as soon as we see anything,’ he adds quickly, pre-empting Kolo’s ritual command.