by Dan Abnett
‘Not a warhead?’ asked Dolor, looking at the scene.
His equerry, an Ultramarines captain called Casmir, was monitoring the information feed on a battle-grade data-slate.
‘No, tetrarch, not a warhead. Very little metallic registering in the analysis of its down-track.’
‘And it was small, too,’ he added.
‘It set the machine works ablaze.’
‘It probably ruptured something flammable. It went down through the roof at the northern end, and then punched through several storeys. Crews are trying to get to it.’
‘How did it get past the damned grid?’ asked Dolor. ‘In the name of the Throne, this is the most fortified and sky-watched world in the quadrant!’
‘I can’t answer that, tetrarch,’ Casmir replied. ‘The data is incomplete. There is no trace of it prior to the point of atmospheric entry. I’ll keep working on it, but there is no trace of any in-system plot, not even a cloaked one.’
Dolor frowned.
‘So what? Did it just jump out of a ship in orbit?’
Casmir laughed.
‘Nothing jumps out of a ship in orbit, tetrarch. Not if it’s going to fall like that.’
Dolor looked at the pilot.
‘Set us down. Over there.’
The moment the lander had settled, Dolor punched the ramp-hatch key and exited. His immense, armoured boots crunched across a rockcrete quadrangle covered in glass and ceramic fragments from the machine shop’s blown-out windows. Six-legged Mechanicum bulk servitors were firefighting in the steaming ruins of the fabricatory shed’s western end, blasting retardant foam from shoulder-mounts. Two of them scuttled past the tetrarch as he approached. They were heading back to the carrier parked in the street to refill their foam reservoirs.
Figures came to meet Dolor. Some were Ultramarines, others were regular humans from the city watch and district medicae. They all snapped to attention.
‘Who has authority here?’ Dolor asked.
‘We have the zone secured, lord tetrarch,’ said the leading Ultramarine, his boltgun mag-clamped to his chestplate, ‘but Consul Forsche has jurisdiction.’
Forsche stepped forward. He was a solemn, dark-haired man in suit and mantle. He made the sign of the aquila.
‘Tetrarch,’ he said, and nodded.
‘The primarch personally sent me to oversee,’ said Dolor. ‘Report, please.’
‘We’ve controlled the fires and accounted for all personnel,’ said Forsche. ‘Some injuries, but no fatalities. All the damage you see is due to kinetic impact and collateral.’
‘And the object?’
‘We’ve located it by scan. It’s gone down about six floors into the sub-basement, or possibly the sanitation system beneath that.’
‘What is it?’
‘We haven’t cut down to it yet, my lord. A lot of machine shop structure fell into the impact hole after the strike.’
‘I want to see,’ said Dolor.
Forsche nodded and beckoned for him to follow.
Guilliman walked alone along the private hallways of the Residency, avoiding the public spaces. These quiet corridors, lined in marble and pale wood, had often hosted Konor, pacing for no purpose other than to think. How much of a Battle King’s life, Guilliman wondered, was spent in whirring contemplation, compared to the proportion spent in actual battle?
Was that Horus’s failing? Named as Warmaster, did Horus take that title too literally, and allow himself to be enflamed past reason by a choleric humour until he was full of violent urges and thus vulnerable to the poisons of the warp? What was it the Wolves had called it? Maleficarum?
Guilliman had always believed that the true purpose of a warlord, or a Battle King, or a warmaster, was not to wage war but to prevent it. War should not be the natural state of life. It should be resorted to only when all other agencies failed. But when war became the only means, a warmaster or a Battle King had to be capable of prosecuting it to crushing compliance.
In Horus, Guilliman had always felt, there was an ugly propensity to love war for war’s sake. Was that the human flaw that had led to this calamity?
The eyes of past leaders watched him from gilded frames as he passed portraits of consuls and Battle Kings. How had they managed that balance? What personal struggles of conscience had they endured to keep society safe from its enemies yet unsullied by war?
How would he, Roboute Guilliman, fare when that feat of balance became his to master?
He reached the private entrance into the Residency. The huge pairs of outer and inner doors closed automatically behind him, their hisses sealing him in his private realm.
He paused for a moment in the high chamber, and glanced out of great windows at the single new star shining in the troubled, golden sky, and the wisp of smoke rising from the cityscape in the south. He began unclasping his gauntlets while he scanned the datafeed on the old cold-gestalt cogitator.
There was no new information on the impact. He would wait for the tetrarch’s report. Euten had told him to delegate. Dolor was more than competent.
A chime alerted him to the arrival of his visitor. Guilliman put aside the one gauntlet he had unbuckled and keyed the high chamber’s public doors to open.
An Ultramarines sergeant with a red helm entered and saluted. His armour was well-maintained, but worn from months of toil and warfare. Guilliman could barely make out the unit insignia. A blade had left a cut down to bare metal across the red visor. On the right pauldron there was a scouring mark, undoubtedly the trace of a flamer’s touch. Guilliman noticed all such miniscule details in one glance. Even from the Space Marine’s bearing, he could read much. Thiel had always been a confident, almost reckless warrior, but now he seemed subdued and unsure of himself. The unremitting intensity of the Calth war had fused him into a state of constant readiness, a perpetual expectation of threat that even the down-time voyaging back to Macragge had not diminished. Thiel’s hand, subconsciously conditioned, never strayed far from the butt of his clamped weapon, as though he believed he might be ambushed at any second.
It was chastening to see a man so changed, so imprisoned by tension.
‘You’ll keep the armourers busy bringing that plate back to inspection standard,’ Guilliman said, as lightly as he could.
‘I trust my service has been worth every scuff and scratch, lord,’ said the sergeant.
Guilliman smiled. He held out his bared right hand. The warrior hesitated, then took it.
‘Good to see you, Aeonid. Good to see you indeed. Come, bring me news of Calth, and forget this formality for a moment. Unclasp that helm. I’ll send for wine, or amasec, perhaps.’
‘There is no need, my lord.’
‘There’s every need, Sergeant Thiel. I want to spend some time in conversation with a man who has been devotedly practical since I last saw him. There’s too much theoretical here on Macragge.’
‘I have seen plenty of evidence to the contrary, my lord. Macragge was always a defended world, a capital world, but such defences we saw as we came into orbital space…’
‘Security is pre-eminent, Thiel. Now sit and remove that helm, and talk to me.’
Thiel hesitated.
‘With your permission, my lord, I brought battle-brothers I would like you to meet with me.’
‘Indeed?’
‘They served as my squad in the Underworld War these past eight months. I owe every one of them my life. If it’s stories you want, they have plenty to tell, and I would appreciate it very much if you honoured them with a little of your time. They are loyal brothers.’
‘They are with you?’
‘They wait without, in the anteroom, lord.’
‘Bring them in, Thiel.’
At a signal from the sergeant, the other Ultramarines entered: nine battle-brothers, their blue plate as worn and ma
rked as Thiel’s. Unit insignia and marks were virtually illegible on all of them. They all exhibited the same quiet intensity as Thiel, so much that it seemed like timidity, as if they were afraid of entering such a bright, luxurious, peaceful environment, or afraid at least of disgracing it with their worn, imperfect armour. Guilliman sighed quietly. What appeared to be timidity was just hard-wired tension that might never unwind. This was the price the accursed Lorgar had made his Ultramarines pay.
He drank in the details again, each untold story plain to see: an armour plate slightly distorted by a melta’s brushing touch; a missing finger, sutured and sealed; a gladius with the wrong coloured grip that had been taken up as a battlefield replacement and forced to fit the wearer’s scabbard; the pockmarks of a too-close call with Tempest munitions; the slight twitch of a visor from side to side, hunting for hidden killers even here in the Ultramar Residency.
‘Each of us was the remainder of a broken squad,’ said Thiel. ‘Expediency brought us together on Calth.’
‘Let me know you all,’ said Guilliman. ‘Sit. Lose those helms. Tell me your stories, face to face.’
Awkwardly, the Ultramarines began to do as they had been instructed. The situation did not suit them. Two or three seemed unwilling to sit. No one removed his helm. Were they ashamed of their scars? Were they ashamed to show the Mark of Calth?
One had spaced himself back near the main door, a curious placement that was the vestige of squad discipline in chamber-to-chamber fighting. One always covers the exit. Guilliman regretted bringing them in. He should have handled the meeting differently, in one of the squad rooms of the Fortress where they would not have felt so out of place. Guilliman felt a great measure of pity for them: built for war, and then locked into a fierce one, they had become unused to the simple habits of society. They had most probably lived in their armour for the last year, never letting their weapons out of their hands.
They all carried them, bolters and blades, holstered and sheathed. It was odd to see armed men from the warfront in the heart of the Residency. The only weapons openly carried in the private chambers were those of the Cataphractii escort and the palace guard. But Guilliman could hardly ask these weary veterans to check their trusted weapons at a gatehouse. It would be like asking them to surrender something integral, like a hand or an eye. These were the instruments they had depended on for their lives during their tour in Calth’s Underworld War, they were part of them, extensions of themselves, and to deprive them–
A thought occurred.
‘You lost the sword?’ he asked.
‘Lord?’ Thiel replied.
‘The blade that I loaned you at Calth? The one from my collection?’
‘Yes. Yes, sadly that was lost.’
Such a small detail. Just one among the hundreds of details Guilliman had absorbed in the last three minutes. It was so tiny, so insignificant, it ought to be ignored, but the past two years had taught him that nothing was too small to ignore. It was in his nature, the way he was engineered, to study every single fact available and notice any discrepancy. To read the potential of anything, the way a card player reads tells.
‘Why do you keep your face hidden, Aeonid?’ he asked.
‘My lord–’
‘What kind of sword was it? What type of weapon?’
Thiel did not reply.
His right hand went for the boltgun mag-clamped at his hip.
Guilliman turned cold. Through sheer force of will, he negated dismay, surprise, disappointment, even the desire to curse the fact that he had been tricked, or to vent his hurt at how the treachery had been delivered. There was no practical time for any of those things. They were mere luxuries.
He negated them in an instant, because if he used that instant to indulge in any of them, he would be sacrificing his single, nanosecond opportunity to do one far more important thing.
Which was remain alive.
‘Be careful, my lord!’ Consul Forsche called out.
Dolor paused and glanced back, hoping that Forsche would appreciate the full meaning of his withering look. A human urging a fully armoured transhuman giant to be careful?
Dolor clambered down into the well of wreckage that the object had created with its auguring impact. The fires were damped, and more servitors were cutting away at crumbled cross spars and fallen roof supports. Steam and smoke, mingled in equal measures, rolled up out of the cavity.
Forsche began to follow him, hitching up the skirts of his robe so that he could climb down the side of the debris pit.
‘Now you be careful,’ Dolor growled. ‘Stay put. I’ve been in worse, but you’re not dressed for this. Stay put.’
Forsche nodded, and took his place at the lip of the pit. Other members of the recovery crew stood with him, peering down.
Dolor continued to descend. A way below him, he could make out two servitors using las-cutters to slice through a slab of buckled and displaced floor plating.
‘We are close to the object,’ one of them reported to the tetrarch in a reedy, augmetic tone as he came down to them.
Dolor reached their level and jumped the last few metres onto the slumped decking. He looked up, and saw human faces and legionary visors staring down from several floors above.
‘The primarch will reprimand me for allowing you to go down there alone, lord tetrarch,’ Captain Casmir remarked over the vox-link.
‘There isn’t room down here for a lot of us, Casmir,’ Dolor replied. ‘Besides, he gave me a duty, and I will perform it personally. Anything further from the orbital grid?’
‘Nothing yet, my lord. Still processing.’
Dolor looked at the heavy servitors. Braced on their multiple limbs, they were peeling back the section of flooring, using their manipulators to curl the metal plating back like the lid of a food can. As one continued to grip, the other switched back to close cutting work to free twisted bars and connectors. Sparks leapt from shorn and dangling cable work. Fresh smoke swirled up out of the ground as the flooring cap was stripped away.
Dolor moved closer.
‘We cannot guarantee your safety,’ one the servitors told him.
‘Noted,’ Dolor replied.
‘We have detected something below,’ said the other.
‘Let me see,’ Dolor said. He crouched at the lip of the pit they had exposed and peered down. To either side of him, the servitors activated shoulder-mounted banks of work lights. The dark broiling smoke of the pit became a blinding white haze, defeating even his occulobe enhancements.
‘That’s useless,’ Dolor said. ‘Off.’
The servitors obediently shut off the lights. Dolor rose to his feet again.
‘Casmir,’ he voxed, looking back up the deep throat of the pit. ‘My helm, please.’
He’d handed his suit’s helm to the equerry before making his descent.
‘I’ll bring it down directly, lord tetrarch.’
‘Just throw it, Casmir.’
There was a slight pause and then the beautifully crafted war-helm appeared, tumbling down through the air into the pit. Dolor caught it neatly and clamped it in place, then crouched again at the lip of the hole, his transhuman eyesight further augmented by the visor’s powerful light-sensitive optics.
He saw the shape at once, because it was hotter than the surrounding structures. He saw the heat outline of it.
It made no sense. Why would anyone drop the statue of a man from orbit?
Dolor hesitated. He scanned again, and took another reading. He was not looking at super-heated black granite; he was looking at roasted flesh, burned to charcoal. He was looking at a humanoid figure that had been turned into a seared corpse by the heat of re-entry, then smashed into the ground, pulverising every bone.
‘Great Throne…’ he whispered.
It was extraordinary enough that it was a corpse. Then full rea
lisation sank in. There should be nothing left. Given the fall, the heat, the ablation, the impact, anything organic, including bone, should have been utterly vaporised.
There should be nothing left.
He opened his vox-link.
‘I need a full medicae recovery team down here right now!’ he called. ‘And Casmir? Have this area sealed, vermilion-level security!’
6
To the
Death
‘It is easier to forgive an enemy than a brother.’
– proverb of the Five Hundred Worlds
Thiel fired his boltgun. His men began shooting too.
In that first moment, in that first eye blink, time hung in the air, as weightless as a bar of sunlight. Guilliman’s transhuman physiology accelerated from nothing to hyperfast response.
Practical. Read. Move. React. Read everything. No other thoughts. Practical.
He read the storm of bolter-rounds spitting from gun barrels. He read the white-hot muzzle flashes almost frozen mid-belch by the suspension of time as his heightened reactions propelled him to a new state of response. He read the mass-reactive shells in the air, travelling, burning towards him–
Guilliman was already moving, already turning. His right hand was grabbing the edge of a heavy sunderwood chart table, and pulling, overturning it.
Practical. Read everything. So many variables, but so few that will make a difference. Extreme close quarters. Outnumbered and outgunned. Not even the slightest margin for error.
Time seeped like resin. The top of the flipping table, heavy as a drawbridge gate and suddenly rising to meet Thiel like a bulldozer blade, took the first four rounds virtually point-blank. The mass-reactive shells detonated, biting vast wounds out of the dense, aged hardwood, filling the air with splinters and burning fibres. One leg of the table came spinning away.
Guilliman was diving sideways behind the exploding tabletop, full-length in mid-air.
The table completed its overturn and crashed against Thiel and the Ultramarines beside him, forcing them to backstep. All of the other visitors were firing. Six bolt-rounds missed the diving primarch, annihilating a section of the high chamber wall and several portraits hanging upon it. Others hit the spilled table and a chair beside it. Another clipped Guilliman’s left shoulder guard and detonated. His plate protected him from the worst of it, but the heat of the nearest detonation scorched his left cheek and the nape of his neck, and shrapnel peppered the side of his face.
