Ultramarines

by Graham McNeill

  An approaching scream of engines drew Sicarius’s eyes to the sky.

  Ultracius and the others had just emerged from inside the Indestructible, carrying Gallo and Lumic between them. Sicarius hadn’t seen Renius since he had woken. He wasn’t listed among the dead, however. He had likely descended to the star fort’s buried bowels, to sift through the remnants of the Adeptus Mechanicus’s precious engines.

  Sicarius set out across the cold, dark plain to meet the first of the arriving Thunderhawk transport ships. There were other battles to be fought, and more glory to be won.

  The Temple of Correction was quiet. Well into the Veil Watch, Calgar saw only a handful of pilgrims and supplicants walking the slow circuit around the shimmering sepulchre of the Avenging Son.

  It wasn’t just the late hour that kept the Temple of Correction quiet. Visitors to Macragge were few and far between these days.

  The war against the Bloodborn had seen to that. Scattered remnants of M’kar’s ruinous host still infested the asteroid belts and the farthest corners of Ultramar, raiding and causing whatever spiteful havoc they could muster.

  Lazlo Tiberius had the Chapter fleets rooting the traitors from their every bolthole, but Ultramar was thick with places to hide.

  Upon seeing the Chapter Master of the Ultramarines, the pilgrims bowed or fell to their knees in adoration. A few even hesitantly approached, but a warning glance from the axe-bearing warriors of the Honour Guard soon dissuaded them from coming any closer.

  Calgar wished Eryx’s veterans did not have to be so inflexible, but the Decree of Protection was absolute and unbending. Bloodborn infiltrators had reached the surface of Macragge in the guise of pilgrims, and no-one wanted a repeat of what happened to Fabian of the Third at Evanestus.

  Calgar recognised the specific gene-traits of men and women from Espandor and Quintarn. He heard dialects from those worlds closest to Macragge, even a man whispering in the dark vowels characteristic to Konor’s eastern cities.

  To reach the crown world of Ultramar, these people would have followed the Pilgrim Trail from Iax to Calth, from Calth to Espandor and then to Macragge. Those with means might once have diverted to Talassar to see the ancient walls of Castra Tanagra, but nobody went there now.

  Castra Tanagra had seen too much death, too much suffering. Its wounds were too fresh to be gaped at, even respectfully. In time, the pilgrims would return to its high valley, but Ultramar had tears yet to shed before then.

  ‘I like to come here when I need to restore my equilibrium,’ said a voice from a recessed reliquary. ‘I imagine it is the same for you, my lord.’

  ‘Were you waiting here for me?’ asked Calgar, as Varro Tigurius emerged from the reliquary, his skull-topped staff held loosely in his right hand.

  ‘Why would you think I might be?’

  Calgar bit back his first response, in no mood for his Chief Librarian’s habit of answering a question with one of his own.

  ‘Because you have petitioned me for the last week with an audience, and you know I often come here when it’s quiet.’

  ‘Does it help coming here?’ asked Tigurius. ‘To lessen the burden upon you, I mean?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ admitted Calgar. ‘I look up at Lord Guilliman and I think of the times he lived through. It comforts me to know that what we face is a spit in the rain compared to what the Five Hundred Worlds faced then.’

  ‘Then I will pre-emptively offer an apology.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For adding to your burden.’

  Calgar beckoned Tigurius forward. The Honour Guard parted to allow the Librarian within their armoured shieldwall.

  ‘The last year has been hard, yes?’ said Tigurius, taking Calgar’s proffered hand.

  ‘I don’t have time for this, Varro,’ said Calgar, and they set off on a circuit of the mighty primarch’s shimmering stasis tomb. ‘Just say what you have to say.’

  ‘The past year has been hard,’ repeated Tigurius. ‘The losses suffered in turning back the Bloodborn were grievous, and all efforts are bent to replenishing the ranks of the fighting companies. Few are the petitions from beyond our borders for aid to which you will grant an audience.’

  ‘Fewer still are those to whom I send my warriors.’

  ‘With good reason,’ said Tigurius. He paused as they came to the marble slab marked with the dead of the Veteran Company. ‘Our realm is weaker than it has been for centuries and, more and more, the burden of its defence falls to the mortals of Ultramar.’

  Calgar’s huge gauntlets curled into fists. His temper had been a fraying thing of late, and the obliqueness of Tigurius’s approach was only making it worse.

  ‘Did you set this ambush just to depress me further or is there a point to all this?’ he asked.

  Tigurius nodded and looked up at the list of names rendered in gold leaf on the pale marble. At the head of the list was the name of First Company’s greatest hero in living memory, Saul Invictus.

  Calgar reached out to touch it as he always did.

  ‘The point, my lord,’ continued Tigurius, ‘is that a decision must be made concerning Agemman. I know you value his counsel and his sword arm, but this is not the time to allow past glories and a lifetime of honourable service to blind us to the fact that Castra Tanagra has changed him.’

  ‘Severus Agemman is a hero of Ultramar,’ said Calgar with a warning tone. ‘A hero of the Imperium.’

  ‘That he is,’ agreed Tigurius. ‘No question. I stood with him on the walls of Castra Tanagra. I watched the two of you face the daemon lord, but he is not the man he once was.’

  ‘None of us are, Varro,’ said Calgar, looking at the gaunt, drawn features of the librarian. ‘Perhaps you most of all.’

  Holding the daemons back from the walls of Castra Tanagra had drained Tigurius in ways Calgar could never know.

  Tigurius smiled grimly. ‘There’s truth in that, my lord, but you know of what I speak. The First Company needs a warrior who can lead them in battle, and Severus has never fully recovered from the daemon lord’s blow that struck him down. You know it, and I know it.’

  ‘You would have me replace him?’

  ‘I would,’ said Tigurius.

  ‘And who could replace him? Sicarius? Ventris? Galenus?’

  ‘It is not my place to say.’

  ‘Since when has that ever stopped you?’

  ‘This decision must be yours and yours alone,’ said Tigurius. ‘Much depends upon you making the right choice.’

  Calgar heard the subtext.

  ‘Is there something I need to know?’

  ‘Many things,’ said Tigurius. ‘But chief among them is that a new enemy gathers, an inhuman foe whose ancient mind is beyond anything we have faced before.’

  Tigurius looked up into the face of the Avenging Son.

  ‘And we must be ready to face it.’

  About the Authors

  Gav Thorpe is the author of the Horus Heresy novel Deliverance Lost, as well as the novellas Corax: Soulforge, Ravenlord and The Lion, which formed part of the New York Times bestselling collection The Primarchs. He is particularly well-known for his Dark Angels stories, including the Legacy of Caliban series. His Warhammer 40,000 repertoire further includes the Path of the Eldar series, the Horus Heresy audio dramas Raven’s Flight, Honour to the Dead and Raptor, and a multiplicity of short stories. For Warhammer, Gav has penned the End Times novel The Curse of Khaine, the Time of Legends trilogy, The Sundering, and much more besides. He lives and works in Nottingham.

  Nick Kyme is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Deathfire and Vulkan Lives, the novellas Promethean Sun and Scorched Earth, and the audio drama Censure. His novella Feat of Iron was a New York Times bestseller in the Horus Heresy collection, The Primarchs. Nick is well known for his popular Salamanders novels, including Rebirth, the Space Marin
e Battles novel Damnos, and numerous short stories. He has also written fiction set in the world of Warhammer, most notably the Time of Legends novel The Great Betrayal. He lives and works in Nottingham, and has a rabbit.

  Graham McNeill has written more Horus Heresy novels than any other Black Library author! His canon of work includes Vengeful Spirit and his New York Times bestsellers A Thousand Sons and the novella The Reflection Crack’d, which featured in The Primarchs anthology. Graham’s Ultramarines series, featuring Captain Uriel Ventris, is now six novels long, and has close links to his Iron Warriors stories, the novel Storm of Iron being a perennial favourite with Black Library fans. He has also written a Mars trilogy, featuring the Adeptus Mechanicus. For Warhammer, he has written the Time of Legends trilogy The Legend of Sigmar, the second volume of which won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award.

  Josh Reynolds is the author of the Blood Angels novel Deathstorm and the Warhammer 40,000 novellas Hunter’s Snare and Dante’s Canyon, along with the audio drama Master of the Hunt, all three featuring the White Scars. In the Warhammer World, he has written the End Times novels The Return of Nagash and The Lord of the End Times, the Gotrek & Felix tales Charnel Congress, Road of Skulls and The Serpent Queen, and the novels Neferata, Master of Death and Knight of the Blazing Sun. He lives and works in Northampton.

  Steve Lyons’s work in the Warhammer 40,000 universe includes the novellas Engines of War and Angron’s Monolith, the Imperial Guard novels Ice World and Dead Men Walking – now collected in the omnibus Honour Imperialis – and the audio dramas Waiting Death and The Madness Within. He has also written numerous short stories and is currently working on more tales from the grim darkness of the far future.

  An extract from Nightbringer.

  60 million years ago...

  The star was being destroyed. It was a dwarf star of some one and a half million kilometres diameter and had burned for over six billion years. Had it not been for the immense, crescent-moon shaped starship orbiting the system’s fourth planet and draining its massive energies, it would have probably continued to do so for perhaps another sixteen billion years.

  The star generated energy at a colossal rate by burning hydrogen to helium in nuclear fusion reactions deep in its heart before radiating that energy into space. These reactions produced intense electro-magnetic fields in the star’s core that rippled to the surface in seething magnetic waves.

  A clutch of these surging fields erupted as a toroidal loop of magnetic flux some 200,000 kilometres in diameter, producing a dark, swelling sunspot within the star’s photosphere.

  This active region of magnetic flux expanded rapidly, suddenly exploding upwards from the star’s surface in a gigantic flare, covering a billion square kilometres and becoming a bright curling spear of light in the star’s corona. These power­ful waves of electromagnetic energy and sprays of plasma formed into a rippling nimbus of coruscating light that spiralled a snaking route towards a rune-encrusted pyramid at the centre of the vast starship. Eldritch sigils carved into the ship’s side blazed with the received energies and the hull pulsed as though the ship itself was swelling with barely contained power.

  Every flaring beam of light ripped from the star that washed its power over the ship shortened the star’s life­span by a hundred thousand years, but the occupants of the starship cared not that its death would cause the extinction of every living thing in that system. Galaxies had lived and died by their masters’ command, whole stellar realms had been extinguished for their pleasure and entire races brought into existence as their playthings. What mattered the fate of one insignificant star system to beings of such power?

  Like some obscene mechanised leech, the ship continued to suck the vital forces from the star as it orbited the planet. An array of smaller pyramids and obelisks on the ship’s base rippled as though in a heat haze, flickering in and out of perception as the massive ship shuddered with the colossal energies it was stripping from the star.

  Abruptly the snaking beam of liquid light from the star faded and vanished from sight, the silver ship having had its fill for the moment. Ponderously it began to rotate and dropped slowly through the planet’s atmosphere. Fiery coronas flared from the leading edges of the crescent wings as it descended towards a vast, iron-oxide desert in the northern hemisphere. The surface of the planet sped by below: rugged mountains, grinding tectonic plates and ash-spewing volcanoes. The ship began slowing as it neared its destination, a sandy dust bowl with a tiny spot of absolute darkness at its centre.

  The ship’s speed continued to drop as the shape resolved itself into a glassy black pyramid, its peak capped in gold. Its shimmering obsidian walls, smoky and reflective, were impervious to the howling winds that scoured the planet bare. Small, scuttling creatures that glittered in the burning sun crawled across its surface with a chittering mechanical gait. Runes identical to those on the orbiting starship hummed as powerful receptors activated.

  The ship manoeuvred itself gracefully into position above the pyramid as the gold cap began to open like the petals of a flower. The humming rose to an ear-splitting shriek as the smaller pyramids and obelisks on the ship’s underside exploded with energy, and a rippling column of pure electromagnetic force shot straight down the black pyramid’s hungry maw.

  Incandescent white light blazed from the pyramid, instantly incinerating the mechanical creatures that crawled across its surface. The desert it stood upon flared gold, streaks of power radiating outwards from the pyramid’s base in snaking lines and vitrifying the sand in complex geometric patterns. The enormous vessel held its position until the last of its stolen energy had been transferred. Once the gold cap of the pyramid had sealed itself shut, the ship made the long trip back into orbit to repeat the process, its intention to continue ripping energy from the star until it was nothing more than a cooling ball of inert gases.

  The vessel settled into position before the star, the arcane device mounted upon its hull powering up once more.

  An area of space behind the vessel twisted, shifting out of true and ripping asunder as the fragile veil of reality tore aside and a massive flotilla of bizarre alien vessels poured out from the maelstrom beyond.

  No two ships were alike, each having its own unique geometries and form, but all had the same lethal purpose. As though commanded by a single will, the rag-tag fleet of ships closed rapidly on the crescent-shaped starship, weapons of all descriptions firing. A series of bright explosions blossomed across the mighty ship’s hull, bolts of powerful energy smashing against the uppermost pyramid. The craft shuddered like a wounded beast.

  But this starship could fight back.

  Arcs of cobalt lightning whiplashed from its weapon batteries, smashing a dozen of its foes to destruction. Invisible beams of immense power stripped another group down to their component atoms. But no amount of losses could dissuade the alien fleet from its attack, and no matter how many were destroyed, it seemed there were always more to take their place. The faceless crew of the starship appeared to realise that unless they could escape, they were doomed. Slowly the ship began to rotate on its axis, a powerful, electric haze growing from its inertialess engines.

  A multitude of alien weapons hammered the ship’s flattened topside, tearing great gouges in its hull and blasting jagged chunks of metal from the vessel. Self-repair mechanisms attempted to stem the damage, but, like the ship itself, they were fighting a losing battle. Wreckage from the ship spun off into the darkness of space as its engines fired with retina-searing brightness. Time slowed and the image of the enormous ship stretched like elastic, the nearby gravity well of the star enacting its revenge on the vampire ship as it vainly attempted to escape.

  With a tortured shriek that echoed through the warp, the crescent ship seemed to contract to a singular point of unbearable brightness. Its attackers were sucked into the screaming wake and together the foes were hurled into oblivion, perhaps never to return.
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br />   The star continued to burn and, far below, the glow emanating from the golden cap of the black pyramid faded until it was a dull lustreless bronze.

  Soon, the sands obscured even that.

  The 41st Millennium...

  The eighteen riders made their way along the base of the frozen stream bed, their horses carefully picking their steps through the ice-slick rocky ground. Despite their caution, and the herd of nearly a hundred scaly-skinned grox they were driving through the snow, Gedrik knew they were making good time.

  He twisted in the saddle, making sure the herd was still together.

  Gedrik was lean and rangy, wrapped tightly in a battered, but well cared-for snow cape with leather riding trousers, padded on the inner thighs, and warm, fur lined boots. His head was protected by a thick colback of toughened leather and furs, his face wrapped in a woollen scarf to keep the worst of the vicious mountain winds at bay.

  The green plaid so common on Caernus IV, Gedrik’s home planet, was tied loosely across his chest, its frayed ends hanging over the wire-wound hilt of his sword. Hidden in his left boot, he also carried a slender bladed dagger. He had crafted both weapons himself from the Metal six years ago, and they were still as sharp and untarnished as the day he had forged them. Preacher Mallein had taught him how to use the sword, and they were lessons he had learned well; no one in the Four Valleys could fight as well as Gedrik.

  To complete his arsenal he carried a simple bolt-action rifle slung across his wide shoulders. Gedrik knew they were almost home and he looked forward to a warm fire and the even warmer embrace of his wife, Maeren.

  This last week on the mountains, gathering the herd for the slaughter, had been hard, as though the wind and snow had sought to scour the pitiful humans who dared their wrath from the rocky peaks.

  But soon they would be home and Gedrik could almost taste the fine steak Maeren would cook for him once Gohbar had begun slaughtering the herd.