The First Wall

by Gav Thorpe

  Khârn was thrown back in the cupola as the driver rammed the assault transport forward, the Land Raider heeling and swaying as it picked up speed, thundering across ground cratered by thousands of shell bursts. Around him others vied to take the lead, their shouted urging crackling across the vox, mixed with boasts of the souls they would send to Khorne’s realm that day.

  The roar and smoke of the assault column surrounded Khârn, a battle-din that started his hearts thumping their own percussion, the implant in his skull adding an insistent, rapid pulse to the symphony.

  But it was inside that the music swelled. He felt the Blood God reaching into him, lighting a fire in his gut to ignite a rage that no mortal shell could contain. He revved Gorechild, delighting in the glitter of the signal flame on the whirr of the mica-dragon teeth that served as its blade. He let out a roar that became a howl, and then from deep within he gave voice to the demands of Khorne, slamming his fist upon the armour plate in time with his chant.

  ‘Kill! Maim! Burn!’

  Arabindian massif,

  ninety-seven days before assault

  The thrill of finally being allowed to tread upon the hallowed upper deck momentarily quelled the sickness roiling through Zenobi’s gut. She held her breath as her eyeline cleared the hatch and she was granted her first proper look at the domain of the officers.

  It was disappointing. Bare metal bulkheads created a small, square space directly around the ladder. A bench was bolted to the wall, and though it was currently unoccupied the scuffing in front of it was evidence of the sentries that had been using it. Beside it a few steps led up to an armoured hatch with a small round window, though all she could see beyond was a sky smeared with dark clouds underlit by the early morning sun.

  To the left and right stretched narrow corridors lined with more doors, leading to another ladder landing about ten metres away, and so on and on for the length of the carriage.

  She turned about, away from the bench, to find another corridor, broader than the others, that ran across the width of the train. There were ladder rungs cut into the wall here, leading up to roof entrances, armoured like the other gun turrets. A few metres away a dynastic enforcer waited, maul held across the front of her thighs in both hands, feet shoulder-width apart in regulation pose.

  ‘This way,’ she told Zenobi, stepping to one side and pointing to an open door a few metres further along the passageway.

  The sound of footsteps on the rungs behind her prompted Zenobi to move, aware that Jawaahir was following. She hurried past the enforcer and into the waiting chamber. Inside was more metal, and at first she took it to be a cell. There were holes in the walls where shelf brackets had been bolted, revealing the chamber’s original purpose as a storeroom. In place of whatever crates and sacks it had contained it now played host to a small metal table and two chairs set opposite each other.

  There was a triangular banner hanging on the wall – real cloth from a pole of real wood. The design incorporated the six symbols of the dynastic chiefs, gold against a red background, the whole trimmed with coiled purple thread.

  ‘One of the old standards, from Unification.’ Zenobi turned to find Jawaahir at the doorway. The integrity high officer glanced at the chair with its back to them and Zenobi moved next to it immediately. ‘A reminder to us that Hive Addaba has a history with the Emperor that stretches back generations.’

  Zenobi opened her mouth to reply but was silenced by a raised hand. Jawaahir stepped into the interview cell and closed the door behind her. She placed a hand on Zenobi’s shoulder as she walked past, firmly pushing her into the metal chair, before taking the seat opposite. She knitted her fingers together on the table and Zenobi noticed the bright scarlet of her fingernails – implants she guessed, not painted. Like the tattoos, they were permanent modifications to declare her position and allegiance.

  ‘You are Zenobi Adedeji, line worker and now trooper. Captain Egwu vouches for you and has even entrusted the company banner to your care. That is quite remarkable, a serious responsibility for a seventeen-year old.’

  Zenobi kept her nerve, and her silence. There had been no question asked and it seemed unwise to volunteer information.

  ‘I think she is right.’ Jawaahir leaned back and her hands moved to her lap. ‘I’m sure you know all about the history of the Adedeji.’

  ‘I share the name of a ruby dynasty. Their blood is in me even if my family have fallen low in status in recent decades.’

  ‘Former ruby dynasty. Shamed by the Emperor, for resisting Unification.’

  Zenobi fought the temptation to defend the honour of her ancestors. Many a squabble, and a few outright brawls, had proven that whatever the facts, the accepted story of the Adedeji was that they had betrayed the Emperor.

  ‘The Adedeji are no longer among the Gifted Six. I’m a line worker, I don’t know much about the top-hive politics or what happened to my distant relatives.’

  ‘And you are loyal to Addaba.’

  Zenobi nodded. There seemed nothing further to add to the assertion. A ghost of a smile passed across Jawaahir’s lips.

  ‘Do I frighten you?’

  The truth, Zenobi remembered. Everyone that had come out of the interviews had a single message to pass on: just tell the truth.

  ‘I find you and your officers intimidating,’ she said. ‘I know that my loyalty to the cause is as strong as the foundations of Addaba. Even so, I worry that you might not see that.’

  Jawaahir pursed her lips, eyes never straying from Zenobi’s. The trooper met her stare for as long as she could, out of pride more than defiance, but eventually her gaze dropped to her hands. She was gripping the edge of the table tight and hadn’t realised it.

  ‘You’ve not said a single word to convince me of your dedication,’ said Jawaahir. ‘You’re very calm.’

  This time Zenobi could not hold back the urge to speak.

  ‘I haven’t anything to fear, if what you say is true. I am loyal. I swore the oaths. Oversee– Captain Egwu herself recruited me, and my family. If I didn’t trust you, I’d still trust her. And since she came back down after… Since she is still commander of the company, I guess that you must trust her too.’

  ‘Do you find that logic reassuring?’ Still Jawaahir’s eyes bored into Zenobi. She wasn’t sure if the integrity high officer had even blinked. ‘Is that how you see the world, a place of reasons and rules?’

  ‘I lived on the factory line, bana-madam,’ Zenobi said. ‘Everything works a certain way or it doesn’t work at all. People die if it goes wrong.’

  Jawaahir smiled again, though now the expression was dry, devoid of any humour.

  ‘I meant no offence,’ Zenobi added quickly.

  ‘People die in battle too, if people do not follow the system. You are a follower, aren’t you, Trooper Adedeji?’

  ‘I will obey the orders of my officers, bana-madam,’ Zenobi assured her interrogator. ‘I would never bring disgrace to the name of Adedeji.’

  ‘No, I’m sure you wouldn’t. That you have retained the name, when most of your distant relations threw it away like an old jerkin, tells me it means a lot to you.’

  Zenobi had to clamp her teeth shut to stop the words that wanted to burst from her. For more than a week she had hardened herself to the idea of being shouted at, accused, insulted and threatened but she hadn’t expected this nagging, baiting line of conversation. It was like her grandmother’s silent stare when they’d been assembled as youngsters to uncover the perpetrators of some infantile misdemeanour. The guilty were always the first to spring to their own defence. It wasn’t until she was fourteen that Zenobi had realised this. Unfortunately, too late to make use of it, her grandmother having been passed to the endforges two years earlier.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ Jawaahir sat forward again, clasped hands back on the tabletop. ‘Answer me now!’

&nbs
p; ‘Abay Su-su,’ Zenobi replied without thought. She flushed, embarrassed at the childish nickname. ‘My father’s mother. She was the law keeper in the family when I was little.’

  ‘I am older than your grandmother was, Zenobi. Can you believe that?’

  ‘No, bana-madam. You… Your skin, your hair… Maybe, for top-hivers. No work smog in your lungs, no forge heat on your skin.’ Zenobi frowned, her eyes flicking to the tattoos and fingernails. ‘Maybe the dynastic chiefs give you a pick-me-up, right? I heard that top-hivers can live seventy, eighty years or more.’

  ‘That is right, and also wrong. I am a little over ninety years old. I will live a few more years but I cannot have another treatment. This journey, this battle that we travel to, will be my last effort for the dynastic chiefs. No endfires for me, I expect. Nor you, Zenobi. How does that make you feel, to know that your body will likely end up on a pile, rotting under the sun in some place you have never heard of?’

  ‘I’ll be dead, I’ll not care either way. What matters is how I die.’

  ‘And how will that be?’

  ‘Fighting for freedom and the lives of my companions, bana-madam.’ Zenobi stood up, feeling a wave of assertion pushing her to her feet. Her knees wobbled slightly but she held her place, and a look with the integrity high officer. ‘If my words don’t convince you, then I hope I live long enough that my actions do. If you doubt me, then pull your gun and shoot me like those officers.’

  ‘Really?’ Jawaahir stood and flipped the top of her holster. She slid out a long-barrelled autopistol, the crest of the Ellada dynasty engraved into a plate on its side. The muzzle swung towards Zenobi, the small black hole swallowing all of her attention. ‘Is this how you would die for Addaba?’

  Zenobi tried to speak, cowed by the muzzle, regretting her rashness and the hint of pride that had led her to dare the anger of this woman. It had been a foolish, selfish act. Insolent.

  She closed her eyes and bowed her head, accepting her punishment.

  ‘If I have done wrong, chastise me, bana-madam. But ask yourself a question first.’ Zenobi straightened and looked the officer in the eye again. ‘Would you rather not have one more bullet for your real enemies?’

  Lion’s Gate space port, surface approach,

  Highway Two, assault hour

  Ahead of the assault, thousands of slave-beasts and the serfs of the Iron Warriors continued to throw themselves at the defensive line that had been drawn across the highway leading into the south-eastern gate of the space port. Gun towers and pill boxes spewed fire into the numberless mass, prevented from targeting the incoming transports by blocked lines of fire and the fear of being overrun by the much closer foe. Gun captains further up the Lion’s Gate port’s flanks had no such concerns and it was not long before shells began to fall among the blur of red transports carving furrows through the ash, dust and smoke that blanketed the Katabatic Plains.

  The tanks leading the charge opened fire, their accuracy severely diminished by the rate of advance and inexperience of their crews. Even so, a welter of siege cannon shells, las-blasts and plasma punched through the swirl of smog and debris, flaring against the local power fields and smashing into ferrocrete walls.

  The support echelon slewed aside, guns still firing, allowing the transports to race past, their own weapons flaring and roaring.

  ‘Into the heart of battle!’ snarled Khârn. ‘Drive your blades down their throats!’

  The road was littered with the corpses of earlier attacks, crushed beneath the tracks of the Land Raider, sending splashes of blood up its blue-and-white flanks. Khârn’s enhanced sense of smell was awash with the scents of death and battle. His eyes rolled back in his head as he took a deep draught, intoxicated by the thought of imminent bloodshed.

  The Land Raider slowed and Khârn forced himself to focus. Ahead, a throng of turncoat soldiers and Legion slaves pressed along the highway, blocking the way.

  ‘Drive on,’ he yelled down through the hatch. ‘Go through!’

  The driver laughed and accelerated again, bringing the Land Raider back up to full combat speed. Some of those unfortunates at the back of the crowd heard the approach of engines above the din of the ­barrage and turned in time to flee. Others did not and were slammed aside, or crushed under the tracks, or pinned upon the razor-sharp blades that had been affixed to the front of the tank.

  Their screams bypassed Khârn’s ears and flared through his brain like bolts of electricity, causing him to howl again. Drool fell from teeth bared inside his helm as animal hunting urges overwhelmed any higher human sense.

  Like a blade parting flesh, the assault column carved through the press of lesser warriors, coating the highway with a slick of pulverised organs and bone. The spray from the tracks coated the following vehicles in gore. The warriors within wrestled with each other to push themselves to the open hatches so that they might be anointed in blood for their new god, armour already much crimson-stained getting fresh slicks of life fluid.

  Several vehicles slewed aside, falling by the wayside as their running gear became clogged with viscera. Their passengers poured out of the assault ramps and through roof hatches, leaping down onto the road to continue the assault on foot.

  As though a curtain peeled back, the throng of serfs and soldiers parted and Khârn heard a great rumbling over and above that of the flying column and the big guns of the Iron Warriors. Detonations blossomed amongst the lead wave, incendiary shells and airbursts scything down hundreds of mortal troopers and mutants pressed into the breach. Beyond them loomed towering armoured vehicles clad in the ochre yellow of Dorn’s Legion. Mighty Leviathans and Capitol Imperialis, three of each, emerged from the vast gateway, guns laying down a carpet of fire that ripped whole companies to bloody shreds in seconds. With them came other super-heavy vehicles – Baneblades, Shadowswords and other variants in colours of the Imperial Army, and VII Legion Malcador heavy tanks with plasma cannons and rapid-firing laser blasters.

  The first wave slowed, baulked by this sudden wall of armoured might and the beams of deadly energy that lanced from their batteries. Some of the rearmost horde regiments turned to flee the counter-attack, only to find themselves in the path of the onrushing chosen of Khorne. Guns roared retribution for their cowardice, cutting them down even as they fell beneath the armoured vehicles.

  Even through the frothing madness of his Butcher’s Nails and the spirit of Khorne rushing through his body, Khârn vaguely recognised the danger. He tried to order the column to slow, so that guns might be brought to bear. The words would not come. He thought to signal the Iron Warriors to redirect their strikes or bring in attack runs from gunships that circled overhead, but all he could manage was an animal panting.

  So it was that instead of fear he embraced the nature of his master and admitted in that moment what he had known in his soul for many years. He would die in battle, broken and bloodied, but his spirit not quenched. Now he gave his death to a cause far worthier than the Emperor, for his blood would spill for the God of Battle and one day his skull would be raised up and placed in honour on the throne of Khorne.

  But it would not be this day.

  The beacon-barrage had called not only to the legionaries of the World Eaters. Khârn felt a shimmer of anticipation run through him and looked up as he heard an unearthly bellow cutting through the tumult of war. Against the lightning-wreathed clouds that crowded above the Palace, a silhouette of a great winged beast appeared. It dived down, trailing godfire and shadow, the gleam of its magic blade like a thunderbolt in the darkness.

  Angron, daemon primarch of the World Eaters, did not slow to land, but speared into the nearest of the Capitol Imperialis. Shields flared and failed, engulfing the titanic engine in brief layers of gold and purple. The tip of the sword sheared through armour like that of a castle’s bastion, and a shower of molten plasteel and shards of ceramite fountained from the gaping wound.
Though the vehicle was the size of a hab-block Angron’s impact was enough to rock it on its huge tracks. With a sound of tortured metal it fell sideways as the primarch beat his wings and howled his anger.

  Khârn’s last sight of his lord was amid sparks and flames, as Angron leapt into the exposed innards of the fallen war machine. He grinned as he imagined the carnage being wrought within, the slaughter of a company of soldiers in tight confines, the walls and floor and ceiling decorated with their blood and body parts, their skulls offered up in praise of the Blood God.

  The remains of the super-heavy command vehicle exploded, engulfed by a plasma fireball two hundred metres across, overloading the shields of its neighbour and incinerating several smaller tanks in the gap between the behemoths.

  Khârn recovered his sight from the blinding flash to see Angron striding from the molten ruin, pieces of burning wreckage jutting from his armour and unnatural flesh, trailing black flames.

  A Leviathan turned its main cannon upon the primarch, belching forth a shell that could break open Battle Titans. Angron cleaved the air with his curse-edged blade, cutting the shell in flight so that its detonation rolled harmlessly around him.

  The mobile command bastion blazed away with full batteries, slamming shell after shell and laser volleys into the unfeeling form of Angron. There was nothing that could stop him: a blood miasma surrounded the primarch, warding away attacks like a power field, drawing energy from the continuing slaughter.

  The counter-attack faltered in the face of the unstoppable beast, and the super-heavy tanks withdrew, leaving a Capitol Imperialis as rear-guard. Platoons of soldiers alighted from its ramps, not to challenge the primarch but to flee for the safety of the space port. Angron bellowed after them, thwarted in his pursuit by a fresh cannonade from a slab-sided Leviathan.

  The column had almost drawn level with their lord, their sponson weapons and pintle mounts chasing the fleeing troopers into the shadow of the Lion’s Gate space port. Khârn dragged himself from the cupola and leapt to the ground as the Land Raider slid to a halt, surrounded by a surge of power-armoured berzerkers chanting for blood and calling upon Khorne for battle-favours.