He broods in a cave that echoes with the heartbeat of the dying world, with nothing but ashes for companionship. At his full height, Hol Beloth is a towering giant in crimson armour, his flesh cut with the words of Lorgar and inked in consecrated blood, but defeat has bowed him. He was chosen for great things, but failed to live up to his end of that bargain, and the forces that empowered him have forsaken his ambitions.
For all Hol Beloth knows, his army may be the last alive on Calth.
His fellow commanders. Do any of them yet live?
Is Kor Phaeron dead or does he still fight to bring the Word to Calth?
Hol Beloth has no answers and the sense of loss is paralysing him.
The warp-flask sits beside him, the oil-dark liquid stagnant and lifeless, where once it wriggled and slithered with the motion of something foetal and immeasurably ancient. He speaks to it, hoping to hear from his fellow commanders, but receives no reply. The thing that deigned to squeeze a fragment of its consciousness into that many-angled space is gone, and Hol Beloth has never felt more isolated. The Ultramarines control the few remaining satellites, and rad-storms on the surface make a mockery of any attempt at encrypted vox.
He looks up as he hears approaching footsteps, legionary footsteps. His mouth curls in a sneer as he sees Maloq Kartho. The Dark Apostle filled his head with visions of power and majesty throughout the approach to Calth and their campaign of extermination. Like all true zealots, he refuses to let their utter defeat diminish his passion. Hol Beloth wants to kill him, but when the nights come to Calth the muttering shadows still attend the Apostle like unseen flunkies.
And in the caverns beneath Calth, it is always night.
‘What do you want?’ demands Hol Beloth.
‘To take the Word to the Ultramarines,’ says Kartho. ‘As you should.’
‘You want to fight?’ snaps Hol Beloth. ‘Go ahead. Make your way to the surface and see how long it takes the orbital guns to end you.’
Kartho is a bleak presence – similarly marked, but thrice favoured. He has the blessing of the primarch, the empyrean and the beasts from beyond the veil. His armour glistens, as though freshly daubed with blood, and the runic inscriptions carved into every plate writhe in the azure bioluminescence of the cave. His helm bears a single horn at his right temple that curls around his head to an iron-sheathed point at his left cheek. At his back is a long staff, black-hafted and trailing smoky shadows that etch themselves upon the air.
His face is angular, swathed in darkness and hard to read.
Hol Beloth suspects this to be deliberate artifice on Kartho’s part.
‘You think your work on Calth is done, Beloth?’ says the Dark Apostle. ‘Do you really believe your task was simply to fight a mortal war? The Warmaster and Lorgar Aurelian require you to do more than spill blood with bolt and blade. They require you to transform the canvas of the galaxy, to bring great truths to those who have been blinded by the Emperor’s empty promises. You are an avatar of the new age.’
Anger touches Hol Beloth and he rises from his torpor with one hand hovering near the hilt of his war-blade, the other curled in a fist.
‘You spoke those words before,’ he says. ‘When I marched at the head of an unstoppable army. They put fire into the hearts of all who heard them, but I understand their truth now. They are as hollow as a Colchisian promise and just as meaningless.’
Maloq Kartho unhooks the spiked staff from his back, and Hol Beloth thinks for a moment he means to attack him. Instead, Kartho plants it into the ground and the muttering shadows swell at his back. The staff’s length is scrimshawed with catechisms and blessings copied from Lorgar’s great book and topped with a circular finial, the eight spines of the Octed radiating from its centre.
‘You are weak, Hol Beloth,’ says the Dark Apostle. ‘Weak and stupid. A petulant child who weeps and wails and gnashes his teeth the first instant his desires are thwarted.’
Hol Beloth reaches for his sword, but before the blade is even half drawn, the dark smoke around Kartho’s staff whips out to slap his hand from the hilt. Kartho is in front of him an instant later, moving without seeming to move, as though the muttering shadows have borne him aloft.
Hol Beloth takes a backward step, surrounded by a veil of darkness that ripples with undulant motion, like a slick of oil in the air. Shapes move within its depths, infinitesimal fragments of immense presences from beyond space and time, pressing at the meniscus that separates this reality from theirs. They have no form, save that which he imprints upon them; a multitude of eyes, fanged mouths and curving horns that manifest and fade as soon as he looks.
They are hungry. They feel the beat of his heart and crave the taste of his lifeblood.
He is powerless to stop them if they attack.
Kartho steps in close, and the darkness parts before him. It wraps itself around him like a shroud, slithering over the curved surfaces of his war-plate, its lightless form lingering at his back like an acolyte.
The sight disgusts Hol Beloth.
‘To think I anointed you and set your feet upon the path to glory,’ says the Dark Apostle with a disappointed shake of his head. ‘Lorgar brought us truth from the place where gods and mortals meet, but you do not see it. You are too ignorant to see it. You have a chance to leave your mortal shell behind and rise to glory, but your moment is passing with every second you spend in wretched self-pity.’
Hol Beloth does not fully understand Kartho’s words, but he feels the terror of everything he was promised slipping beyond his reach, never to come again. He drops to one knee before the Dark Apostle, head bowed as a supplicant.
‘Tell me what I must do,’ he says.
The notion of submitting to the Dark Apostle’s designs is abhorrent to him, but now he knows he will say or do anything to hold on to his ambitions. So badly does he desire to stand at the side of Lorgar and Horus that he willingly begs for Kartho’s scraps.
‘The galaxy is changing, Hol Beloth,’ says the Dark Apostle. ‘The old ways are passing, and a new order is establishing itself. What was is no more, and what will be is just taking shape. Those who embrace that truth will prosper. Those who do not will perish.’
‘Tell me what I must do,’ he asks again. ‘What do the powers require of me?’
Kartho leans down and his hooded eyes are alight with a passion only bloodshed ignites.
‘Atrocity,’ says Kartho. ‘They require atrocity.’
VI
Geologists once came from far distant corners of the Imperium to study the cavern arcologies of Calth. Magi from the forges of Mars and the master masons of the Terran Guilds marvelled at their self-sufficiency and remarked often on how seamlessly the artifice of man blended with the vagaries of natural formation.
Horus himself once came to Calth as Guilliman’s honoured guest, though no one now remarks on that particular visit. Ingenium Subiaco pauses in his labours and wonders what those magi and masons would make of what has been done beneath Calth’s surface now.
A tall man with a permanent stoop that comes from spending endless days bending over highly detailed schemata, the ingenium’s craggy face is crowned with a thinning crop of corn-coloured hair. A set of brass-rimmed goggles, complete with noospheric MIU and a full sensorium suite, is clamped to Subiaco’s haunted face like some form of surgical device. In the fine tradition of the Ingenium from Calth, he cultivates a long moustache with its ends waxed to points that curl over his florid cheeks.
Long days and restless nights have given him an unkempt look, one at odds with his station as a senior ingenium of the Calth Pioneer Auxilia. A wave of tiredness washes through him and his eyes flutter closed for an instant, but he quickly blinks them open. He has too many nightmares in his sleep to wish for more in his waking hours.
Subiaco stifles a yawn and watches as yet another opening in the bedrock is gradually sealed up. Thi
s one is a dead tunnel that delves a thousand metres from a lower branch cavern of Arcology X. The cartographae drones that returned tell him the tunnel is a dead end, but the violence of the war has made accurate readings of the deep caverns next to impossible.
A pulse of thought fades up a noospheric projection of the tunnel’s dimensions before his eyes. Subiaco dials down the magnification to view its entirety. The tunnel is five metres wide and curves downwards in a gentle arc for another three hundred metres, twisting through a series of sharp bends before arriving at a water-filled corrasional cave. The deeper reaches of the tunnel are hazed with error-signifiers. Subiaco wishes he had the time and manpower to map them with greater accuracy.
The cavern in which he stands is filled with the tools of the ingenium: blue and grey earth-moving machines, each with dozer blades tens of metres high, bulk crawlers with pneumatic arms capable of lifting a super-heavy battle engine with ease, drilling rigs with conical snouts, and a lone construction engine of the Mechanicum. The noise they make is cacophonous, and but for the aural baffles worked into the mechanism of his goggles, he would long since have been deafened.
Hundreds of men and women of the Pioneer Auxilia are manoeuvring the last of the blast shutters into metres-deep caissons at the mouth of the tunnel, while lumbering tankers of permacrete stand ready. The Pioneers wear heavy, tear-resistant coveralls and bulky respirators, but toil without complaint in the heat, dust and gloom.
They are bent to their labours with pride and determination.
Subiaco understands that pride, it is Ultramarian to the core.
To strive for excellence is the bare minimum expected of Lord Guilliman’s people, and to be born in the Five Hundred Worlds is an honour and privilege that must be repaid every day.
The world above is no more, but he and his Pioneers will be builders of the world below.
Subiaco watches the work with bloodshot eyes, but he needs offer no suggestions nor make any corrections. His subordinates know their craft and his instructions are precise, needing no further explanation. Instead, he calls up a fuller rendition of Arcology X, smiling as he realises that Captain Ventanus’s hurried marking of a map has effectively renamed this cave complex forever.
Thinking of Ventanus, Subiaco looks up as an Ultramarines sergeant in a battle-damaged suit of power armour approaches him. He does not know this warrior, but the deep blue of his armour is heavily abraded across the breastplate and pauldrons with bullet impacts and blade scars.
Only his helmet is unscathed, painted a fresh crimson that seems oddly fitting.
‘Sergeant Ankrion,’ says Subiaco, optical filters reading the warrior’s name beneath a patina of las-burns on his right shoulder guard. ‘Is there something I can do for you today?’
‘How long until the tunnel is sealed?’ asks the giant.
Ankrion’s tone is brusque, but Subiaco understands his urgency. Subiaco calls up a host of data-streams and sifts graphs of work completion sigils with haptic implants in his fingertips.
‘The shutters will be in place momentarily. Once the integrity checks are complete, we spray the permacrete and I will implant the locking seal. All things being equal, the tunnel will be secure within the hour.’
Ankrion nods, though he is clearly unhappy with the answer.
‘You can’t do it quicker?’ he asks.
‘Not if you want an Ingenium Mark on the work, no.’
‘Would more machines speed the process?’
‘Of course, but we don’t have any more machines,’ says Subiaco. ‘We’re lucky to have the ones we’ve got.’
‘Clarify.’
Subiaco waves a hand at the construction engines and earth-moving machinery, causing his holographic graphs to spin away.
‘None of these machines should be here, Sergeant Ankrion. They were all due for orbital transit when the traitors attacked.’
‘So why are they here?’
‘My understanding is that we have the Word Bearers to thank for that.’
‘I’m not in the habit of thanking those bastards for anything,’ says Ankrion, and Subiaco hurries to explain himself as the Space Marine exudes a looming threat.
‘You misunderstand. The corruption they used to infect the orbital defence systems,’ says Subiaco. ‘It appears it caused a cumulative arithmetical overflow in the scheduling subroutines of a Defence Auxilia calculus-logi, which saw these engines sit idle on the embarkation platforms while the rest of Calth was being shipped into orbit. Lucky for us, eh?’
Ankrion does not reply, and looks up as the last of the blast shutters is lowered into position with a heavy impact of metal on stone. A squad of riveters move into position, their whining guns securing the shutter in place. Sparks rain down from their work, and the permacrete hoses lift with a hiss of pneumatics.
‘This would go quicker if we didn’t have to seal off all these dead branches,’ observes Subiaco, projecting a holographic representation of the tunnel’s structure from the surface of his data-slate. ‘For example, this tunnel terminates hundreds of kilometres from the nearest arcology or shelter. There’s really no need to expend resources to seal it.’
Ankrion takes a moment to study the gently rotating image.
‘Did you find a source for the water in the chamber at the tunnel’s end?’ he asks.
‘No, implying that it is an opening of negligible proportions.’
‘In other words, you don’t know where the water is coming from?’
‘Not as such, but–’
‘Captain Ventanus’s orders are unambiguous,’ interrupts Ankrion. ‘Any tunnel the termination of which cannot be confirmed absolutely is to be sealed.’
‘Sergeant, you need to understand that only a very few of Calth’s cave systems are linked. The vast majority spread through the planet’s crust in splendid isolation.’
‘If Calth is to survive, that’s going to have to change,’ says Ankrion.
VII
Shelter CV427/Praxor sits fifteen hundred kilometres to the east of Lanshear, a series of hardened bunkers and armaments storage facilities. It is designed to hold up to a hundred thousand fighting soldiers and a further twenty thousand ancillary staff, together with three battalions of Defence Auxilia personnel.
Its maximum occupancy is listed as one hundred and fifty thousand souls.
In the wake of the XVII Legion’s attack it is currently home to over twice that number. Its enlarged caverns and deep constructions are nightmares of overcrowding, yet there is little anger amongst its inhabitants, save that directed at the warriors of the Word Bearers who have driven them here.
This is to be expected.
The gates of Praxor have been closed for nearly two weeks, and tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the war and the doomed sun’s radioactive spasms have sought sanctuary within. The shelter’s accommodation is beyond its capacity, and the security of a weapons storage facility requires that every individual be identified. Once a full inventory has been taken of human and weaponised resources, a detailed campaign of resistance and reconquest can be developed.
Every entrance to the shelter, and there are many, has been sealed – some with permacrete shuttering and some with warriors bearing guns. Elements from five different companies of the Ultramarines are now based here: five hundred and sixty-seven legionaries. They do not guard the entrances to the arcology. They train, they re-arm, they mount sorties onto the surface when word comes from Arcology X that enemy forces are nearby.
The security of the gates falls to the Imperial Army – of which there are sixteen separate regiments present locally – and skitarii elements swept into the arcology by the star’s radiation. Command protocols and communications are still in disarray as the Mechanicum adepts try to mesh Army vox-systems with their own and those of the Legiones Astartes. Different systems, hundreds of encrypted networks and tril
lions of code combinations have brought a special kind of hell to operational co-ordination.
It is this that is giving Major Kadene a headache that is only getting worse.
She and her squad of Cardace Storm Troopers occupy one of the smaller routes to the surface, more accurately described as a sinkhole filled with hardscrabble that has been pulled apart by millennia of tectonic movement. It is, nevertheless, a passageway that connects the caverns below with the surface and must be guarded.
Temporary shuttering sprayed with rad-proof sealant allows unprotected humans to occupy the prefab guard post and barricades that watch for infiltrators from the surface. Twenty soldiers occupy the position: battered, war-brutalised veterans who have seen their world torn apart and broken into pieces that can never be put back together. Major Kadene’s men have fought the good fight, and only these twenty of her seven hundred remain. They fought at the Pasuchne Bridge, and held it long enough for the 86th Company of the Ultramarines to cross. Along the Marusine Highway, a ten-thousand-strong rabble of cultist scum chased them for a hundred kilometres before they reached the regimental strongpoint set up at the Talanko Arterial.
Hol Beloth’s flanking forces, moving to encircle Lanshear, were on the verge of forcing them to abandon the strongpoint. But then came the fiery rain from orbit, burning the Word Bearers and their rabble to vapour ghosts.
Leaving her company colours flying proud at Talanko, Major Kadene followed Colonel Rurik as he brought the scraps of their regiment to Praxor.
Kadene knows she will never see the surface of Calth, but hopes that some remnants of the enemy forces will try to fight their way into the shelter. She dislikes being underground, having discovered a mild claustrophobia, but she is a Storm Trooper, and to acknowledge weakness is not in her nature. She sits in the guard post’s single structure, a reinforced tin shack, with a vox-caster and her unit’s stock of anti-radiation pills, ammo, food and water. This is what has become of her once elite unit
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