A Thousand Sons

by Graham McNeill

  The order to disperse the fleet had come with the highest alert prefixes, and the four battle groups made best speed for their destinations. None of the captains knew the nature of the alert, but all had been given strict instructions not to unlock their orders until reaching their assigned coordinates.

  That such orders left Prospero dangerously undefended was clear to every shipmaster, but none dared disobey a direct command from the primarch himself. Whatever the purpose of this dispersal was not for them to question. Their only duty was to obey.

  Military traffic took precedence over civilian vessels, and it took six hours for the Cypria Selene to work its way up the queue of ships awaiting a transit corridor. Eventually, the vessel’s Master Steersman was able to pilot his way towards clear space and open up the plasma drives to take his vessel towards the coreward jump point.

  From there, warp-willing, it would be a three-week journey to the Thranx system.

  THE ANGLE OF launch had been good, and instead of taking four days to reach the coreward jump point, Cypria Selene achieved the necessary safe distance from the Prosperine star to safely activate its warp drives in three. The vessel’s Navigator confirmed the warp-currents in the realm beyond were as calm as he had known them, and the Master of Cartography ran a final positional check before passing his jump calculations to the Navigator’s module.

  In the ship’s observation dome, Lemuel and Mahavastu chatted about where they next planned to visit, while Camille and Chaiya held hands as they listened to the toneless jump countdown through speakers set into the wood-panelled walls.

  Set high on the rear quarter of the Cypria Selene, the dome provided a commanding view over the vast superstructure of the mass-conveyer. Its hull stretched away from them for sixty kilometres, ending in a blunt wedge of a snout. For a vessel intended to carry vast quantities of war materiel, troops and bulk items of warfare and compliance, it was handsomely appointed.

  The four of them had settled into ship-board life with ease, and the cabins they had been assigned by the misdirected clerk were clearly intended for highborn passengers.

  “Give or take, you should be on Terra inside two months,” Lemuel told Mahavastu. “You’ll be back in Uttarpatha, cataloguing old records recovered from beneath the ruins. I hear they’ve finished collating the datacores of NeoAleksandrya, but there’s bound to be more. They’d be mad not to want your help.”

  “Perhaps,” agreed Mahavastu, leaning heavily on an ebony cane with a golden pommel inset with a jade eye. “Though I fear I may be too old for such excitement.”

  “Nonsense,” said Lemuel. “There’s life in you yet.”

  “You are kind, Lemuel,” said Mahavastu, “but I think perhaps I will instead concentrate on my memoirs. What I can recall of them.”

  “I would be happy to read them.”

  “Happier than I shall be to write them, I feel.”

  Lemuel didn’t reply, but simply smiled as Camille and Chaiya joined them at the edge of the observation dome. Perhaps sixty people had come to watch the ship translate into the warp, either curious to see how so enormous a vessel could travel between the stars or eagerly fearful to look into the mysterious realm of the warp.

  If only they knew, thought Lemuel. They would put out their eyes rather than look into a place of such dreadful power.

  “Almost away,” said Camille.

  “Yes,” said Lemuel, nodding towards the glass dome as the countdown reached one minute. “Part of me is almost sad.”

  Aerial-like vanes extended along the entire length of the vast ship, causing the view to shimmer as void barriers powered up in preparation for the jump.

  “Won’t be long now,” said Camille, taking Lemuel’s hand.

  “And then this will all be over,” said Lemuel.

  The count had reached thirty-three seconds when the alarms sounded.

  The automated voice was cut off by a burst of shrieking static. A series of emergency lights flooded the interior of the dome with a red glow.

  “What’s happening?” cried Mahavastu.

  Lemuel had no answer for him, but was spared from admitting his ignorance by an explosion of shimmering, ghostly light off the Cypria Selene’s starboard bow. As though a yellowed fang had torn a terrible wound in the fabric of reality, a blooming froth of light spilled out and illuminated space around the mass-conveyer. It tore wider and wider, blistering streamers of unlight weeping from the wound like blood on a shroud.

  Vast forms moved in the swirling vortex, shaped like gutting knives.

  The first was a lean, feral-looking warship; its flanks slate-grey and brutally punctured with gun batteries and torpedo launchers. Its prow was shaped like a ploughshare, but this was no peaceable vessel, it was a ship of war.

  Its angles were harsh, its lines sleek. It was a hunter of the stars and a killer of ships.

  As it cleared the flaring tear in reality, scores of other fighting vessels jostled for position behind it, golden craft, black craft and a host of predatory vessels in identical livery to the fleet’s leader.

  Lemuel had seen this ship before, in the heavens above Shrike in the Ark Reach Cluster.

  “Is that…?” gasped Lemuel.

  “Unfortunately, yes,” said Mahavastu. “I rather think it is.”

  “You know that ship?” asked Camille. “What is it?”

  “It is the Hrafnkel,” said Mahavastu, “the flagship of Leman Russ.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Thunder from Fenris/So Much Will Be Lost/Canis Vertex

  THE FIRST BOMBS from the Space Wolf fleet struck Prospero just before dawn. The orbital defence platforms had been caught completely unawares. One minute their augurs had been silent, the next a vast fleet of ships had appeared, a buckshot spread of torpedoes already arcing towards the orbital batteries and missile defences. Most were knocked out before they were able to launch a single weapon or power up a single gun. The lucky few that managed a snap shot were bracketed and obliterated moments later.

  With no response from the ground, the armada moved into high anchor above Prospero and assumed a geostationary assault pattern. Thousands of weapons were trained on the planet below: energy weapons, mass-drivers and bombardment cannons. The ships drifted sedately like grand liners in a regatta among the stars. The Hrafnkel opened the assault, its massive weapon systems blinking as etched lines of icy light stabbed down.

  Moments later, the rest of the fleet opened fire.

  THOUGH MAGNUS HAD kept his Legion blind to the approach of the Emperor’s vengeance, the Raptora cult maintained a constant kine-barrier over the city of Tizca. Not even Magnus the Red could undo that protection without someone noticing.

  The first warning anyone had of the imminent attack was a hot wind that seemed to come straight from the sky, pressing down on the city like the pressure before a storm. It tasted of metal and burnt oil. Static leapt from the pyramids’ tops, sparking from silver tower to silver tower as if between the equipment in the laboratory of an insane Magos.

  The sour grey of pre-dawn erupted in light as the lowered clouds were lit with inner radiance. This was swiftly followed by the tremendous crash of atmospheric discharge, like thunder without the lightning. Multiple sonic booms from hypersonic projectiles shattered the graveyard silence, and those citizens of Tizca who still slept were shaken from their beds by the echoes as percussive blasts rolled through the city.

  Like a stabbing finger of raw light, the first energy lance struck Prospero a kilometre north-east of Tizca. It impacted in the wide ocean bay of the port and flashed a five-hundred metre column of seawater to superheated steam. A series of follow-on blasts seared into existence within seconds, marching vertical striations of incandescent brightness that sent up towering geysers of saltwater.

  Banks of scalding fog rolled in from the ocean, boiling the flesh from the bones of early-morning dockworkers. Projectiles streaked through the lower atmosphere on trails of fire as shockwave fists pummelled the sea and sen
t foaming breakers crashing to shore.

  Whole swathes of mountains simply vanished in towering mushroom clouds, magma bombs levelling entire peaks and filling the valleys with rubble. The earth shook with man-made thunder, the relentless pounding of the planet’s surface like pile-driving hammers repeatedly slamming down. In orbit, more and more warships added the weight of their fire to the bombardment, hurling building-sized ordnance towards the planet below. The total saturation of the target area ensured that the city was completely engulfed, enough to level a continent’s worth of metropolises.

  Yet Tizca endured. The kine-shields of the Raptora were the strongest defences any city in the Imperium could boast. Harder than the thickest adamantium and more unyielding than layer upon layer of voids, the invisible umbrella of protection soaked up the violence of the bombardment, though at fearsome cost to the warriors who maintained it.

  The entire populace of Tizca was awake now, moving onto the streets of their beloved city and looking up in confusion and wonder. There was little fear, for the destruction had not yet breached their protected environment. They watched, open-mouthed, as blinding energy weapons burned searing traceries in the sky above, while smudges of black smoke and fire painted the clouds as steel-jacketed shells flattened on the shield. Hastily-mustered Spireguard regiments poured onto the city streets and tried to usher people indoors, but the incredible spectacle was too entrancing to be ignored.

  Magnus the Red watched as the lightstorm blistered and burst over his city. The sky was stained a bloody orange as airbursting incendiary rounds burned the clouds away, and a tear fell from his eye as he watched the land around Tizca die. The forests were burning to ash and the wild grasslands blazed with secondary fires, reducing the unspoiled countryside to a wasteland in a matter of minutes.

  The Desolation of Prospero was complete.

  “Now I know how you felt, father,” he whispered, sensing aetheric energy build in his fists, aching to be released. Magnus fought for calm, reciting the secret names of the Enumerations known only to him. This was his fate; this was what he had accepted as his punishment. He could not cast off his noble intent to pay for his mistakes.

  No matter how much he ached to.

  He watched the thunder batter itself uselessly against the shields of the Raptora.

  “I am here,” he whispered to the heavens. “Do what you will.”

  THE APEX CHAMBER at the summit of the Corvidae pyramid was wreathed in smoke, aromatic fumes oozing from the stone, sweet and tinged with camphire and cedar. Veils hanging from the angled walls twisted in the warm winds billowing from outside, and Ahriman fought to hold onto the high Enumerations as the constant thunder tried to unseat him.

  He sat before the Icon of the Corvidae, a wide crystal boulder shaped like a flat oval with a chunk of black spinel at its centre like the dilated pupil of an eye. The boulder had been hewn from the Reflecting Caves by the First Magister Templi of the Corvidae, and had been used as a focus for prognostication by the cult’s devotees since its earliest days. It floated above a reflecting pool, its waters shimmer-dark and still despite the pounding of the earth.

  Ahriman blinked as he caught a phantom image of a new moon in its depths.

  Always capricious in its revelations, the Icon had been silent for weeks, with not even the most gifted of the Corvidae able to divine so much as a hint of the future. Ankhu Anen and Ahriman had both attempted to see beyond Prospero, but their visions had revealed nothing. Their subtle bodies had been unable to enter the Great Ocean at all, as though something was actively preventing them from venturing beyond Prospero’s horizons.

  Then the bombardment had fallen in a rain of thunder and steel.

  Within moments of the first bombs landing, the warriors of the Corvidae mustered for war in the lower reaches of the Pyramid. Prospero was dying around them, though Tizca remained untouched. That wouldn’t last long. The unseen attackers would soon realise they would need to come down and dig the Thousand Sons out the hard way.

  Who were these mysterious enemies? Who would be insane enough to attack an Astartes Legion on its home planet? More importantly, how had they been able to bring such enormous firepower to bear without anyone being aware of it?

  Ahriman needed answers before he issued a deployment order, and thus he attuned his mind to the crystal and went straight to the source of all knowledge on Prospero: Magnus the Red.

  No one had seen the primarch for weeks, but the great column of fire from his pyramid had been visible all across the city. The mood of its people was fearful. Now Ahriman knew why.

  “My lord, your sons require your guidance,” he said, drawing energy from Aaetpio to focus all his energy on the crystal eye. In the past few weeks, Aaetpio had been his constant companion, his Tutelary no longer needing his summons to attend upon him. Fluttering overhead with shimmering wings, Ahriman used his enhanced power to reach out with his mind towards the crystal within the Pyramid of Photep.

  He felt the resonance of the crystals in the Apex Chambers of the other cult temples, the urgent cries for information from all the captains save Uthizzar. A faint glow shimmered in the depths of the crystal and the gemstone at its heart swam with motion, as though it were no longer solid, but liquid.

  “My sons,” said Magnus, his voice echoing in Ahriman’s mind. Its quality was sharp and edged as it sang from the crystal. “This is our Legion’s darkest hour, but also our moment of triumph.”

  Ahriman felt the sudden joy of his brothers. Until this moment, he hadn’t realised how much he had missed hearing his father’s voice. He forced himself to concentrate on the matter at hand.

  “My lord, what is happening?” he asked. “Who is attacking us?”

  “Leman Russ and his Wolves,” said Magnus matter-of-factly, as though such an occurrence was wholly expected, “together with elements of the Custodes and the Silent Sisterhood.”

  Ahriman was astonished, and his grip on the Enumerations would have slipped but for Aaetpio. Even so, it took a supreme effort of will to hold onto his clinical detachment.

  “Why? What have we done to earn such violence?”

  “Not you,” said Magnus. “I have brought this upon us. This is my doom.”

  “We need to deploy before they launch assault boats,” stated Phosis T’kar. “The kine shield cannot be maintained any longer. I have lost too many warriors holding it this long.”

  “Then lower it, my son,” said Magnus, “for the Wolves are already on their way.”

  “Then those treacherous bastards will learn what it means to attack the Thousand Sons,” snarled Khalophis. “I will show them how the Pyrae make war.”

  “Give us an order, my lord,” begged Hathor Maat. “Please!”

  The eye in the heart of the crystal dimmed, as though retreating into its depths. Ahriman saw the hesitation, and a memory threatened to swim to the surface of his mind, a fragment of his moment of connection to the primarch on Nikaea.

  Khalophis had called the Space Wolves treacherous, but Ahriman knew the master of the Pyrae had it wrong. In this war, it wasn’t the Space Wolves who would be thought of as traitors, it was the Thousand Sons.

  “Leman Russ hates us, but even he would never dare attack us without orders,” said Ahriman, thinking aloud. “This order must come from a higher source. It comes from the Emperor – it is the only explanation. My lord, what are you not telling us?”

  “Always you were the perceptive one, Ahzek,” said Magnus, and the eye swam into sharp focus once more, its hue filled with resignation. “I hid the truth from everyone, even myself, for so long that I was almost convinced it was simply a bad dream of another’s life.”

  Ahriman sensed the confusion of his brother Astartes, each of whom urgently wanted to take the field of battle. If the Space Wolves were coming, every second was precious. He wanted nothing more than to march out with his warriors, but what Magnus was telling him was too vital to be ignored.

  “What did you do?” he demanded, a
ll deference gone from his tone. “When you saved us, what did you do? The pact you made with the powers of the Great Ocean, this is the price of it, is it not?”

  “Yes, Ahzek,” said Magnus. “To save my sons, I made a devil’s bargain, and like the great doctor before me, I thought I had the best of it. All this time, I have been a blind fool, a puppet jerked on the strings of an intelligence greater than mine.”

  A psychic shockwave sent a sharp fracture knifing through the crystal, and a jagged red line appeared in the centre of the eye.

  “I was desperate. I had exhausted every other alternative to save you all,” hissed Magnus, his voice sending brittle cracks throughout the crystal. “From the moment I turned my other eye inwards, I knew they were there: The Eternal Powers of the Great Ocean, beings older than time with power beyond imagining. Only they had the means to save you all from hideous mutation and death, so yes, I supped from their poisoned chalice. You were restored to me and I was content. What father would not do everything in his power to save his sons?”

  “And for that we must suffer?” asked Hathor Maat. “For that we are to be destroyed?”

  “They think we are traitors,” said Ahriman, with the dawning horror of comprehension. “All those who spoke against us at Nikaea will be vindicated if we fight back. Our inability to see the future… We thought it was because the Great Ocean’s currents had turned from us, but it was you, wasn’t it? You kept us from seeing the future. You dispersed the fleet. You want this. Is this why Uthizzar is absent? Did he learn what you planned for us?”

  “Watch your tongue, Ahzek!” bellowed Khalophis. “The primarch would never allow that.”

  “He is right, Khalophis,” said Magnus, and the simple truth of his words broke their hearts. “Uthizzar came to me, and in my weakness he read the truth of it. I could not allow him to warn you or our sacrifice would be for nothing. For the good of all, we must be destroyed.”