by Gav Thorpe
‘The Legion will not fail you, my lord,’ Rann said. His gaze moved past the primarch to Sigismund, who stared at the ground with jaw clenched, whatever emotions he was feeling only barely held in check. Rann stood up, still watching the First Captain. ‘I will prepare my company to move to the Lion’s Gate space port. I hope to see you soon enough, brother. Your sword would be a welcome addition if our lord permits it.’
Sigismund replied with only a flicker of a nod, eyes meeting Rann’s gaze for a split second before returning to the floor.
‘As Lord Dorn wills it,’ he said tersely. ‘Glad would be my sword to join you in this coming battle.’
Whatever vexed the First Captain, it was not Rann’s doing and he departed feeling better for the knowledge.
Djibou transition station, Afrik,
one hundred and six days before assault
The heli-transports headed down into the dawn light, which seemed somehow significant to Zenobi. A new beginning, something like that. She had left Addaba behind but was not sure what came next.
Zenobi was fortunate enough to be within sight of one of the small windows that pierced the hundred-metre-long cabin. She’d seen nothing all flight, but daylight now brought a fresh view.
The coast of an ancient, dead sea ran in a jagged line from north to south, and upon the very lip of the shoreline sprawled a maze of roads, landing strips and railway lines. Excited muttering greeted the sight and those further inside the fuselage left their seats and crowded across the craft for a glimpse of their destination.
Zenobi remained silent as her eye tried to follow kilometre after kilometre of wide highway and looping tracks. Bridges and tunnels turned the criss-cross of incoming traffic into a bewildering maze, half-seen past the constant flights of heli-transports and stratocruisers.
‘Why don’t they just fly us all the way there?’ someone behind her asked.
‘Fuel.’
Zenobi turned to find Lieutenant Okoye standing to the end of the bench on her left. ‘Need to save every drop.’
‘And so why not build the railway all the way to Addaba?’ asked Menber.
Okoye leaned on the back of the bench and shrugged dismissively.
‘Because Dorn chose not to. Rail lines are permanent and might be used by the enemy. There’s probably a dozen of these air fleets moving people all over Terra, and when the fighting starts, they’ll still be useful, but idle tracks won’t. Efficiency and redundancy. If you ever wonder why something is the way it is… that’s your answer, right there. Efficiency.’
The timbre of the engine noise rose in pitch and out of the corner of her eye she saw that they were only a few hundred metres up.
‘Better sit down, sir,’ a voice from the back warned the lieutenant.
All across the compartment troopers were dragging themselves back to their seats, their squad leaders and officers rapping out commands. Okoye swept a last warning look over his charges and returned to his place a little way ahead of Zenobi.
The craft started juddering as it hit the swell of heat coming up from the massive transportation hub, the pilot dipping the nose hard to compensate for the sudden lift. Clattering and shouts filled the cabin as poorly lodged weapons skittered from their places and troopers that had not secured themselves tumbled from their benches. Zenobi rammed her feet into the foot loops and pushed herself back against the bench, fingers moving to the haft of the banner that was wedged between her and Menber.
She felt his hand on hers and glanced aside, drawing reassurance from the gesture and his expression.
The heli-transport dropped the last few metres and landed heavily, massive suspension coils squealing in protest, the packed defence troopers calling out and swearing as they were once more thrown around the crowded compartment.
‘Stay seated!’ bawled a sergeant near the front, the call echoed by other squad leaders along the rows.
The address system crackled into life.
‘Companies and platoons will leave in reverse order of embarkation.’ Egwu’s voice was tinny, almost unrecognisable. ‘Form up when ordered. No pushing and no loitering. We clear the transport in ten minutes or the whole company will be on reduced rations as punishment. Other troopers are waiting for this ride.’
Palatine Arc quarantine zone, six hours before assault
It had once been known as the Palatine Arc, a crescent of palatial dorm-blocks for high-ranking administrators that covered nearly a hundred square kilometres inside the Europa Wall. Before the erection of the defences, the kilometre-high towers had enjoyed views of newly verdant mountain valleys to the south of the Imperial Palace. Each had housed only a handful of diplomats, arch-clerks and other privileged attendees of the Terran Council, in hierarchy only second to the seated Senatorum members.
After concerted efforts by the Death Guard, the Palatine Arc had been renamed by the refugees that inhabited it.
Poxville.
The attempted levity did nothing to alleviate the suffering of those within. Supplies were dropped once a day by gyrocopter, crates of protein powder and barrels of barely drinkable water. Nothing else. A few brave medicae – some of them already marked by one of many virulent diseases – ran clinics inside the quarantined zone. If they saved any it was only so that they would endure longer in a pit of unremitting misery. Hundreds every day were transported into Poxville, but not a single man or woman was allowed out.
Stationed upon freshly raised walls that surrounded the ruins of the Administratum buildings, Katsuhiro felt more like a ghost than a man, even more wraithlike than when he’d been in the depths of battle shock on the outer defences. He had heard rumour of a creed that declared the Master of Mankind a divinity, but if that was so then Katsuhiro was forced to wonder why he would be punished by the God-Emperor in such malicious fashion. To be delivered from the battle without had seemed a blessing. He had thought to stand at one of the great bastions, but instead, like thousands that had faced the plague-ridden sons of Mortarion, he had been despatched to guard the quarantine zone erected around Poxville.
Day after day the Death Guard kept up their attacks. He had almost laughed when he had seen the engines of war lumbering up within range of the walls. Crude-looking catapults – trebuchets and onagers his new captain had called them. Powered by twisted rope or sinew, made of rotting wood and rusting metal, they looked too weak to break even a hovel, never mind the immensity of the Ultimate Wall.
But the wall had not been their target, and their payloads had not been explosives. Instead they hurled infected carcasses, skulls filled with noxious slime and sealed with wax, pots of biting flies and other ammunition suited to a war twenty-nine thousand years in the past. But the cruel genius was that these infectious bombs were not of sufficient speed nor mass to trigger the void shields. It was not worth the might of macro cannons and volcano cannons to pick off the engines one by one, and so they crept forward beneath the gaze of the mightiest guns. Day after day small-arms gunfire raked the approaching weapons, and day after day enough made it through the fusillade to bombard Poxville for a few minutes.
It was not lost on Katsuhiro that the buildings once inhabited by the lords of the Administratum, the highest notaries of tax, account and statistic, were now home to an unknown number of infected. A few days after internment had begun, the authorities had stopped counting. Ten thousand? Twenty? Katsuhiro thought it a low estimate.
Those with any cogency left stayed away from the encircling walls. Those without were met by las-fire if they approached within one hundred metres. Even this cordon was little comfort to Katsuhiro. Plague could carry far on the wrong wind. Sometimes it seemed as though strange eddies would stir up the fumes and guide them towards one part of the wall. Sirens would wail, reminding him of the gas attacks on the trenches. He had been lucky so far, never his stretch of wall. But to hear that distant alarm dragged him back to those sickening
days and nights where painful death was only ever a moment away.
Shooting the infected did not cause him any grief. He was inured to the misery of others, concerned only with his own survival. At times he was jealous of them, driven mad so they no longer knew what would become of them. Death was a mercy – a mercy he craved on the long, cold night shifts when the moans of the dying were loud enough to be heard over the continual bombardment, and the silhouettes of staggering pox-carriers could be seen against the fires burning deep inside the quarantine zone.
There were stories that the plagues of the Death Guard were not merely mortal. Some said they had seen the dead walk again. A lifetime ago, before he had set foot on that train of conscripts, Katsuhiro might have scoffed at such claims. Now… Now, he was unconvinced, he had not seen it with his own eyes. But if he did, it would not surprise him.
Katsuhiro was sustained by a single purpose, one which he pursued in his down-watch when he could. Somewhere the traitor Ashul – or Doromek, or whatever he was called – was inside the Imperial Palace. Ashul lived only because Katsuhiro had been a coward. He still was, but his guilt gnawed at him even more than his fear. He made enquiries when he could. His first adamant questions had been met with suspicion, and he had calmed himself lest he be thought one of the raving infected that he now stood guard against. And, when his health had returned a little, he’d realised that if he made too much fuss over an officer named Doromek, the traitor might hear of it.
Katsuhiro knew that finding one man amongst the teeming millions was near-impossible. It did not matter, because the search was the only thing that gave him any purpose. Without that quest to restore his pride and silence his unquiet conscience, Katsuhiro had nothing to live for.
Fafnir Rann – Lord Seneschal, Captain of the First Assault Cadre, Imperial Fists.
Lion’s Gate space port
Chosen One
A long walk
Lion’s Gate space port, tropophex exterior, seven hours before assault
It belied Rann’s credulity to think that he was atop something that had been built by humans. The Imperial Palace had vast towers and walls, and he’d spent as much time in drop pods and gunships as any legionary, but standing on an open observatory platform thirteen kilometres above sea level was a singular experience.
He turned and looked at the soaring edifice behind him, astounded that it continued another sixty kilometres up. He was glad of his helm and armour, able to stand in the clear air and look down upon the massed cloud banks that boiled across the Palace. Without his war-plate he’d be frozen in moments and dying of oxygen starvation. The only moisture was a gentle drift from the vaporators of the Space Marines’ power plants, tiny snowflakes falling from the vents and drifting away. Were their suits not environmentally sealed their bodies would have been desiccated and preserved for centuries. It made Rann think of the mummified remains of the Old Kings his people’s ancestors had entombed on the mountaintops of Inwit.
Rann fancied that he could see glimpses of stars between the aurora of the upper shields, and the flickering shadow of void-ships passing across them. A product of imagination, most likely, but symptomatic of the sense of wonder he felt standing beneath the uncaring gaze of the upper skies. He was far more certain about the plasma-plumes of drop-craft he watched to the east, rising and falling against the coming night. The flare of other suborbital aircraft criss-crossed the twilight, far above the squadrons that duelled below the cloud cover.
The space port’s immensity was impossible to bring down to human scale, so he regarded it in purely strategic terms as he would a city or smaller fortification. The outer portions of each layer, up to about a kilometre deep, were called the skin; this gave way to the mantlezone around the innermost ten kilometres, which itself was known as the core-wards, or just the core.
It had three main vertical portions, each of which roughly equated to atmospheric layers. The broadest and most populous area was the base, rising to his position, known as the tropophex, though the workers that lived and laboured within its shell referred to it as Low District. It was about this lower region that the bulk of the air transport pads clustered, where both jet and rotary craft could land and take cargo.
Through the tropopause into the stratosphere were a thousand storeys of transit machinery, sealed habitation towers and intermediary orbital platforms, where craft capable of both void and atmospheric travel could join. Sky City, properly known as the stratophex, controlled progress between the uppermost level and the bulk of the space port. These jutting skyquays were linked by communication and power cables, as though some vast spider had spun its web haphazardly over the flanks of the mountain-port. The skin was uninhabited, at least by anything more sentient than a servitor. Port labourers used envirosuits and powered crane harnesses when outside their habs.
The remaining spire soared over six successively narrower towers, and then broadened to a twelve-kilometre-wide landing pad at the summit. Starspear, it was called by the locals, a far more poetic designation than its official title: the mesophex. At its height atmospheric pressure was almost non-existent, allowing void craft to touch down and load directly into the immense conveyor shafts that dropped down through the core. An orbital lift mechanism provided counterweight propulsion, so that when fully in operation a constant stream of immense carriages rose and lowered from the landing platform. They were dormant now, locked down in case of attack.
It left Rann feeling overwhelmed, a tiny figure in yellow armour, not even a speck on the flank of the tallest structure on Terra. He turned to the warrior on his left, a lieutenant-commander by the name of Sevastin Haeger, a Terra-born recruit.
‘Did you know I was a Chosen One?’ said Rann.
‘Your pardon, captain?’
The lieutenant-commander was Rann’s subordinate in charge of the eighteen thousand Imperial Fists currently assigned to the space port’s defence. Rann had a further seven hundred and ninety thousand non-legionary personnel under his authority, as well as several wings of fighter craft and direct-attack bombers. The inhabitants of the port had worked until the last moments of defeat in orbit, bringing in materials and survivors. They had refused to leave since then, barricading their homes and arming themselves, so that the Lion’s Gate militia probably numbered even more than the registered soldiery. They would fight to protect their homes but Rann considered his command of them to exist in title only.
‘I was a Chosen One,’ Rann explained. He turned and the hundred-strong honour guard turned with him, thirty warriors of his personal Huscarls leading the company with shields raised. For the moment an attendant servitor carried his shield, though his paired axes were hung on his belt. ‘My people raised me in the belief that I was marked for greatness, destined to be a powerful leader of the tribe.’
‘Why?’ asked Haeger, confused. Rann’s laugh made him realise the question was an importune one and softened his doubts. ‘What caused your people to have such a belief?’
‘There is a great underground river on Inwit. It flows along the boundary between light and dark for thousands of kilometres, almost a kilometre below the ice plains. It has hundreds of tributaries and many of the tribes follow its course from one ice hive to the next. My people, the Rann, were quite far downstream of this mighty flow. The River of Life, we called it, the Bringer of Fates. The Dorn, our noble lord’s adopted people, controlled the headlands of the mightiest tributary. Anyway, I was found by my mother abandoned on the riverbank.
‘There was a woman’s body close at hand, starved and pierced by wounds, and the corpses of two men armoured in the style of the Dorn. It was reasoned that she had fled them, to protect the child. Some thought I should be given back, lest the Rann earned the wrath of the Dorn, but my mother said she would slit the throat of anyone that tried, and offered the explanation that the Dorn feared I would rise up against them one day and that was why they wanted me dead.’
> ‘They believed her?’
‘My mother was a formidable woman, and a deft hand with a knife.’ Rann took one last look at the skies before the Space Marines passed into the vaulted arch of the compression chamber. ‘I was raised in this belief until puberty, learning from the greatest of the Rann. Blade, hunting, sewing, cooking.’
‘Sewing?’
‘You’ve seen nothing beautiful until you’ve seen Inwit stitchcraft, lieutenant-commander.’ Rann stopped, his train of thought derailed by the interruption. ‘What was I saying?’
‘The Chosen One story,’ prompted Sergeant Ortor, with the tone of a man who had heard it more than several times.
‘Right. There I was, all ready to become leader of the Rann on my transition to adulthood, though I was a bit wary of waging war on the Dorn, when the Lord Praetorian arrived and everything changed. The first time he came downriver everybody of the Rann knew their Chosen One was a poor imitation of the real thing.’
‘And how did you end up as one of the Legion?’ asked Haeger. There was a chorus of groans from the Huscarls.
‘Perhaps another time,’ said Rann.
He turned as the armoured portal began to grind shut, and saw again the distant lights of hundreds of landing craft. Rann knew enough to conclude there was no other reason for their appearance other than as a prelude to an assault on the Lion’s Gate space port. The reports had alluded to it, but he had wanted to see it with his own eyes.
‘I need to speak with Lord Dorn. This isn’t a feint, and we’re going to need more guns.’
Djibou transition station, Afrik,
one hundred and six days before assault
There was a sense of solidity that came from a large body of people moving together with a united purpose. Though no order was given, Zenobi found herself falling into step with those around her, finding the natural rhythm that joined them. As on the factory lines, there was a harmony between the troopers, an instinctual togetherness derived from long acquaintance and practice. Just as the line had its own pace and routines, so the work groups that had become defence corps squads settled into a unified movement.
