The Chapters Due

by Graham McNeill

  A Capitol Imperialis was more commonly deployed behind the front lines where it would act as a command and control base for an army’s senior officers, as well as providing emergency medicae facilities.

  “Is that going to fight on the surface?” asked Learchus.

  Uriel and Pasanius shared a puzzled glance.

  “No,” said Uriel. “Of course not.”

  “Surely that thing will be too big to fit within the caves beneath Calth.”

  Uriel smiled. “Not even a little bit.”

  His vox-bead chirruped, and Uriel pressed a hand to his ear as the voice of Lord Admiral Tiberius sounded.

  “Uriel, we have company,” said Tiberius. “I don’t know how they’ve done it, but we’ve picked up enemy ships well within the system reaches and moving into attack formation. A battle-barge and at least fifteen other ships, destroyers and frigates mainly, but some others we’ve never seen before.”

  “Can you hold them?”

  Tiberius hesitated. “Together with the orbital defences, I can buy you some time, but we won’t be able to stop them from reaching the surface, that’s a certainty.”

  “Understood,” said Uriel. “Do what you can, but keep the Vae Victus safe.”

  “I will, Uriel,” said Tiberius. “Courage and honour!”

  “Trouble,” said Pasanius, reading his expression. “How bad?”

  “Bad enough that we need to hurry up,” said Uriel. “Pass the word that we make for Guilliman’s Gate within the hour.”

  HONSOU WATCHED THE Ultramarines fleet break into battle formation. Lines of howling scrapcode trickled down Warbreed’s viewing bay, obscuring much of the view with gibberish. The symbols were meaningless to Honsou and the rest of the crew, but with Cycerin controlling virtually every aspect of the ship now, there was little was need for mortal crew members to understand them.

  The feeling that his ship was becoming a living entity, with Cycerin at its heart, was unsettling, though the warpcraft of the rapidly evolving magos had kept their enemies blind to their presence long enough for the fleet to reach the innermost regions of the Calth system. But for a hidden picket line of augur buoys, they might have reached the blue planet’s orbit in complete secrecy.

  “So this is where Uriel Ventris is from?” said Cadaras Grendel, staring hungrily at the cold planet gently revolving before him.

  “Yes,” said Honsou, glancing over his shoulder at the shuddering form of the Newborn as Cycerin plumbed the depths of its mind with invasive mechadendrites.

  “It doesn’t look like much.”

  “It’s a poisoned rock,” said Honsou, keeping his tone even. “Uninhabitable unless you live like a troglodyte in a cave deep underground, but there is something here we need to destroy, an ancient shrine from the days of Horus Lupercal.”

  “A shrine? What shrine?” demanded Vaanes.

  Honsou hesitated before answering. “M’kar told me of it before the fleet dispersed. It’s a reliquary shrine to some lost Chapter of the Ultramarines. I figure it’s something symbolic from the days of Horus. Whatever it is, M’kar wants the shrine and everything in it destroyed.”

  “So we’re acting on the daemon lord’s orders now, eh?” smirked Grendel.

  “No,” snapped Honsou. “Calth and Ventris are our priorities.”

  “If this shrine is so important to M’kar, why isn’t it here destroying it?” asked Vaanes.

  Honsou gave him a cold glance, trying to hide his own interest in the shrine. Vaanes had always been the cleverest of his lieutenants. Honsou had asked that same question of M’kar, but the daemon lord had been cryptic in its response.

  “That world is anathema to me,” was all it had said.

  Honsou turned away, ignoring Vaanes’ question, and marched to the edge of Cycerin’s vat of gelatinous amniotic fluid. Pulsing tendrils like fat, oily snakes writhed from the pool, twisting across the deck and plugging into warp-knew-what. Each was wreathed in flickering green light, sickly and rotten.

  One dripping tendril waved in the air, the sharpened interface spike buried in the back of the Newborn’s skull. Like the rest of them, the Newborn was clad in its armour, though whether or not it would be fit for battle was another matter entirely. Emerald light bled from beneath its eyelids and sweated from the joints of its armour.

  Grendel and Ardaric Vaanes followed him, watching the distance between the two fleets of ships wind down. To have approached so close to Calth without detection was no small achievement, and Grendel knelt beside the vat containing Cycerin’s essence.

  “Not bad,” said the disfigured champion, begrudging even that faint praise for the magos.

  “I’ll be more impressed if he’s able to do what he says he can do,” said Honsou.

  “Will it be a problem if he can’t?” asked Vaanes, looking over at the approaching Ultramarines ships. “These aren’t just picket ships, they’re Adeptus Astartes ships of war.”

  “It won’t be a problem, it’ll just take longer,” said Honsou, pushing Grendel out of his way. He felt foolish at addressing a bloated shape in a gelatinous pool, but Cycerin never emerged from his sunken vat now.

  “Are you ready?” he said.

  ++Affirmative++ said the magos in his vile, bubbling cant.

  “Then let’s get this started,” said Honsou.

  Emerald columns of corrupt scrapcode flooded the main viewscreen.

  ABOARD ORBITAL DEFENCE Platform Heliotropus Three-Nine, Magos Secundus Lacimae ran through his pre-battle system checks. Launch algorithms were checked a thousand times a second by the machine spirits, and remote telemetry feeds from the augurs reported a margin of error in the region of 0.00000034, which was well within acceptable tolerances.

  Around his circular command throne, twenty mono-tasked servitors oversaw the proper maintenance rituals of the ten macro-cannon batteries mounted on Heliotropus Three-Nine, each attending to the rites necessary to effect the swift loading and accurate firing of such complicated and fractious weapons. Gusts of incense filled the command centre and rites of accuracy and destruction scrolled over the targeting cogitators in binary and hexadecimal.

  The hololithic globe floating over the surveyor station displayed the precisely aligned formation of the Ultramarines fleet, though Lacimae noted that the Blue Sun was out of position by nine point four kilometres. A negligible amount in spatial terms, but a significant one to a priest of Mars.

  He factored the captain’s misaligned vessel into his firing solutions, knowing that anything daring to come within the lethal envelope of his guns would soon be reduced to a blasted hulk, blazing from end to end.

  One of his servitors twitched at its station, its head and shoulders convulsing as green sparks flashed from its console. Like a deadly infection, the green lighting arced from console to console, spitting and fizzing as it wormed its way into every system.

  Ladmae turned his noospheric senses inward, tracing the source of the intrusion. Fields of binaric code overlaid his vision, endless streams of ones and zeroes arranged with fluid grace in a seamless ballet of mathematics. But something black and oozing was spilling out, like oil from a sinkhole.

  He tried to isolate the corrupt code, but with every shunt and code-blocker he erected, more of the impure numbers would spill into the operating systems of the machine spirits. He felt their pain as beautiful lines of code became twisted and ugly, endlessly replicating their incorrect formulae until he knew there was no way he could stop it.

  “Notification: Defence platform Heliotropus Three-Nine, Magos Secundus Lacimae reporting hostile code attack. Unable to maintain operational readiness.”

  The vox system burbled, spitting an angry growl of static back at him, and he had no way of knowing if his warning had been heard. Lacimae withdrew his senses from the internal systems and saw the green lightning flowing throughout the command centre.

  He felt it probing his own defences, and steeled his aegis barriers to keep it out.

  Though many of
his emotional responses had been removed in his progression through the ranks of the Adeptus Mechanicus, he was not so far gone down the route of mechanisation that he did not feel fear as he saw the corrupt scrapcode realigning the weapons of the defence platform Heliotropus Three-Nine.

  He extended a mechadendrite spike into the input port, but no sooner had he done so than a vicious bark of green lightning fused it in place. Unable to break his connection to the defence platform’s systems, he could only watch in horror as his wondrously crafted firing solutions began changing.

  “LORD ADMIRAL,” SAID Philotas, the deck officer of the Vae Victus. “I’m picking up some disturbing signals passing between the enemy fleet and the orbital defence platforms.”

  Tiberius stood at his hardwood command lectern, his fingers dancing over the embedded hololithic slate he used to send his orders around his ship. The softly-lit command bridge of the Vae Victus was a place of quiet efficiency, the deck crew well-trained and motivated, the servitors regularly maintained and serviced.

  The addition of servitors was a change for the venerable ship, the conflicts with the greenskins and tau having proven their use to Tiberius in no uncertain terms. Though he preferred a living crew capable of functioning under their own initiative, he grudgingly admitted that servitors were at least efficient.

  “What kind of signals?” he asked. “Send them to my lectern.”

  “These,” said Philotas, transferring the surveyor data to the Lord Admiral.

  Tiberius watched as a stream of unintelligible machine code scrolled across the slate, bile green and somehow wrong, as though these numbers violated all sane mathematical laws.

  “What is this?” demanded Tiberius. “We’re about to get into a fleet engagement here, Philotas, I don’t have time for random data curios.”

  “My lord, this is scrapcode!” said Philotas with sudden, horrified recognition. “The language of the Dark Mechanicus!”

  Tiberius reached the same conclusion as the unclean numbers seemed to clump together on the slate. Dread touched him, for he had seen firsthand how much damage scrapcode attacks could do to the delicate logic engines of a starship. A number of warning icons flashed to life on his slate and he shut off the flow of hissing, angry numbers.

  “What in the name of the Holy Throne…” he said.

  “Weapons lock!” called the Master of Weapons as the bridge lights switched to the blood red hue of battle stations. “Defence platform Heliotropus Three-Nine has a locked firing solution on us.”

  “Torpedoes in the void!” cried Philotas. “Defence Platform Arklight Seven-Seven has fired a full spread of hull-piercing warheads at us. I read a minimum of nineteen inbounds.”

  Tiberius descended the steps of his lectern and rushed over to the stone-rimmed plotter table, watching as the zipping icons of the torpedo spread closed the distance between Calth’s defence platforms and the Ultramarines fleet.

  Six more platforms winked as the augurs detected launches, and alarm klaxons blared as fresh target locks were detected.

  “Launch countermeasures!” ordered Tiberius. “Evasive manoeuvres! Get us out of here!”

  “Aye, my lord,” answered Philotas, issuing the necessary commands. The deck plates groaned as the ship’s engines fired up and the atmospheric manoeuvring thrusters roared to life. A Space Marine strike cruiser was far more agile than its vast size would suggest, but it could not turn and evade as quickly as it now needed to.

  Proximity alarms chimed as the torpedo spreads raced towards them. Whoever had taken control of the orbital defences knew their craft, and every vessel in the Imperial fleet faced a host of incoming warheads.

  “Brace for impact!” shouted the Master of Weapons. “Battery fire incoming!”

  The bridge shook as building-sized explosive shells impacted on the shields, and Tiberius knew they would be collapsed in moments by the multiple batteries at their rear.

  “Are we betrayed?” demanded Tiberius.

  “No, my lord,” said Philotas, running over and pulling out a brass jackplug from the plotting table and slotting it into a socket behind his ear. “Not betrayed, compromised. The enemy must have a data-savant with knowledge of Ultramar’s command protocols.”

  “How in the nine hells would they get something like that?”

  “I don’t know, my lord.”

  Tiberius dismissed the question as irrelevant, cursing himself for wasting time when there were more pressing matters to hand. He returned his attention to the plotter table, despairing as he saw the enemy vessels surge forward in the wake of the explosions and crippling damage cutting through the Imperial fleet.

  He’d promised Uriel more time, but as more and more damage reports from his fleet appeared on the plotter, Tiberius saw that was a promise he wouldn’t be able to keep. His fleet was crippled, six ships already out of action and another three drifting away from the battle lines. This fight was lost, and they hadn’t even fired a shot. Tiberius opened a fleet-wide vox-channel.

  “All ships, this is Admiral Tiberius on the Vae Victus,” he said, affecting an air of calm he certainly didn’t feel. “Every captain who is able is hereby ordered to disengage, I repeat, disengage. Remove your vessel from the fight and regroup at rally point Ultima Six-Eight. Tiberius out, and may the Emperor guide you!”

  He closed the channel, his heart heavy at having to issue such an order.

  Tiberius looked over at Philotas and tapped the image of Calth on the plotter.

  “Contact all ground forces,” he said. “Warn them they’ll have the enemy dropping on them any moment.”

  PART 2

  FORTRESS ULTRAMAR

  NINE

  THE ASSAULT ON Calth began with a thorough bombardment designed to strip away the air defences of Highside City. As the Imperial ships withdrew, Honsou’s fleet dropped into low orbit to more precisely aim their weapons, and lancing bolts of vertical light winked into existence as gun batteries flashed like strobes. Their accuracy was undiminished by thermal blooming since Calth had no atmosphere and the results were devastating.

  Warbreed’s bombardment cannon, guided by Cycerin’s absolute knowledge of ballistic trajectories, slammed high explosive shells on their targets with a precision not even the greatest gunners of the Imperial Navy or Adeptus Astartes could match. The Iron Warriors would have need of Highside City, and the destruction was wrought with surgical precision.

  Highside City was now open to the air, its defences stripped by the accuracy of the bombardment, and in the wake of the barrage from space, drop-pods fell towards Calth without the fiery contrails normally associated with such assaults. With no atmospheric friction, the iron missiles slashed down at terrifying speeds, a host of aircraft following in their wake. Heavy landers, bulk carriers and vessels that could not normally pass though the atmosphere without burning up dropped to the surface of the planet, all bearing warriors of the Bloodborn and everything they needed to prosecute the attack on Calth.

  The majority of the city’s defenders were no longer there, already making best speed for Guilliman’s Gate. Any units left to defend Highside City would not survive, and Uriel was unwilling to ask any man to make such a sacrifice when there were greater battles still to come. Yet the city was not undefended, far from it.

  Magos Locard volunteered a regiment of weaponised servitors to defend Highside City, hurriedly inloading basic hunt and eliminate wet-ware into their biomechanical cortexes. They wouldn’t be able to adapt to any changing battlefield circumstances, but they would never retreat and would never stop fighting until they were destroyed. Five hundred skitarii volunteered to remain behind and further delay the attackers.

  The first drop-pods smashed through the skylights of Assembly Hangar Septimus Oravia, hammering down on the exact spot where the first Thunderhawk of the Vae Victus had landed, The weaponised servitors could not appreciate the synchronicity of the moment, and simply opened fire at the first iron-plated warriors to emerge.

  HONSO
U FELT A delicious thrill as he leapt from the drop-pod, tasting the caustic bite of the lethal atmosphere mixed with the burned stone and metal taste surrounding the drop-pod. To set foot on a world of Ultramar with carnage in mind was a feat few had achieved, and he wondered what Kroeger and Forrix would have made of his achievements.

  Twelve drop-pods were scattered through the vast hangar, each one spilling warriors in burnished plates of iron with yellow and black chevrons into the thick of battle. Bolters roared in a near-continuous cacophony, filling the hangar with muzzle flashes. Eight warriors followed him onto the segmented decking of the drop zone, the most brutal and zealous of his army. The Newborn dropped to the ground next to him, its bolter firing with practiced ease and unerring accuracy.

  Honsou’s artificial eye fuzzed with static as he saw Ventris in the creature’s easy movements, remembering the shot that nearly killed him and left him with the crude augmetic in the first place.

  Grendel led the initial landing, his lieutenant’s temperament ideally suited for the thundering violence of such battles. There could be no subtlety in a drop assault; the defenders needed to be smashed aside with speed and ferocity, pushed back from the landing zone with brute force to allow follow-on units to land in safety. The enemy they were facing was no ordinary foe, but the Iron Warriors had weapons of such bludgeoning power that their foe’s lack of fear was of no consequence.

  Two Dreadnoughts emerged from heavily armoured drop-pods, slamming down and unleashing mechanised howls of insane bloodlust from their sarcophagus-mounted augmitters. Towering giants of blackened iron, these killers of men were little more than psychotics chained within an armoured shell and fitted with the most destructive weapons imaginable. That these sometimes turned upon their allies was a small price to pay for such powerful linebreakers. Hooked chains swung from their shoulders and blazing light suffused the horned heads carved on the glacis of their sarcophagi. Gunfire pattered from their armour and they crashed with stomping footsteps toward their enemies. Honsou jogged into the smoke of battle with his bolter pressed tightly to his shoulder in search of targets.