Perturabo: Hammer of Olympia

by Guy Haley

  The Vulpa Straits blinked, and the representations of the hrud swarms funnelled themselves into that single corridor of space.

  ‘We have no worlds there, thanks to Dantioch’s incompetence. But that may work to our advantage. The hrud will not be expecting resistance.’ Perturabo became animated. ‘If we were to use a larger-scale version of the stasis traps we employed on—’

  A trilling fanfare interrupted Perturabo’s argument. The warsmiths looked around to find a nervous mortal officer walking hesitantly toward the primarch, a herald cherub flitting overhead.

  ‘Why do you come in here?’ demanded Harkor, moving round the table to confront the man. ‘This place is forbidden to mortals.’

  ‘I… I am sorry, my lord. I was ordered to come There is an urgent matter that demands the primarch’s attention.’

  ‘What matter?’ Perturabo did not look at the man, occupied as he was by his war plan.

  The officer swallowed nervously ‘My lord, we have the resupply flotilla on an inward trajectory.’

  ‘Why inform me of this information?’ said the primarch tersely. ‘Do I not have a Legion of experts to deal with such matters?’ Harkor smiled unpleasantly at the mortal.

  There was a long pause.

  ‘We are struggling with communications and long-range auspex readings,’ said the officer in a rush, ‘but there appears to be only a single ship.’

  Perturabo’s attention was finally yanked from the table ‘One ship?’ His shadow fell across the shaking officer. His fists clenched, and the officer flinched.

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  ‘Do you know which it is?’

  ‘N-no, my lord.’

  ‘Then find out!’ the primarch growled. ‘Now!’

  Falling over his own feet, the officer fled the Dodekatheon. ‘What now…’ Perturabo said to himself. ‘Brothers!’ he shouted. The assembled warsmiths turned from their games and discussions. ‘Within this table is my latest strategy. Look over it. Test it to destruction. I want a workable plan to avoid a repetition of this debacle before I return. Trident, with me.’

  Harkor, Forrix and Golg left the table and fell in with their lord. Perturabo desired to exercise his legs, as was his habit after his periods of seclusion - invariably, he worked intensely in those times and moved little from his drafting table. They avoided the crew trains running the length of the vessel and instead walked the miles to the command deck in silence. Once Harkor opened his mouth to say something but Perturabo silenced him with a threatening glare.

  The officers of the command deck behaved like men condemned. Quiet orders issued from mouths tight with stress. Pale faces glowed with the sickly reflected light of gel screens. Eyes stole furtively to the Lord of Iron as he paced onto the deck, but none dared look at him for long. His fury boiled off him. His hunched body creaked with violence that the slightest mistake could unleash.

  Perturabo went to stand by the empty shipmaster’s throne. Its mechanisms had been opened and cleaned, awaiting its next occupant. No one knew yet who would be granted that dubious honour.

  ‘Report,’ said the primarch.

  The officer of the watch nodded. The mortals on the deck moved cringingly under the guns of their Space Marine masters, and he was no different. He managed to look the primarch in the eye for half a second, delivering the rest of his news to a patch of floor at Perturabo’s feet.

  ‘It is the Androcles, my lord. They made contact a minute ago.’

  ‘Where is the rest of the resupply fleet?’

  The officer buckled under Perturabo’s seething rage. ‘My lord, l—

  ‘Answer me!’ bellowed Perturabo. He lowered his head to the officer’s level, his spittle flecking the man’s face. He was a monstrous bull, ready to charge. ‘You have opened communications I assume?’

  ‘Yes, my lord,’ said the officer of the watch.

  Perturabo looked around at his cowering servants. ‘Then open me a hololith channel to her commander, immediately! What has happened to you? Have you all taken leave of your senses? Must I do everything myself?’

  The officer shook. He had to swallow three times before he could continue speaking. ‘My lord, Captain Thesuger is on his way here by fast lighter, running ahead of the Androcles. He has news that he wishes to deliver in person.’

  ‘From the look of you,’ said Perturabo to the deck, ‘you are all aware of the information that the captain would impart. Report it to me.’

  ‘My lord. I… I…’ stuttered the captain.

  Perturabo seized the officer of the watch by both shoulders and hauled him off his feet. ‘Tell me!’

  A dark stain spread across the officer’s groin. Three drops of liquid splashed onto the floor.

  ‘It is Olympia,’ he said in a small, terrified voice. ‘It has rebelled against the light of the Emperor.’

  The expression on Perturabo’s face would have been comical under any other circumstances. The colour drained from his flesh, his eyes widened to childlike proportions. His features went slack in disbelief. No one had ever seen the Lord of Iron so. All his certainties were washed away like footings of sand in a flood, and his arrogance collapsed like a castle built on top.

  ‘I… I… am sorry, my lord,’ said the officer.

  Red flushed Perturabo’s cheeks. His forehead blotched. His mouth twisted into a bestial snarl. With a roar, he gripped the officer of the watch. The man screamed as his shoulders shattered under the pressure. Keeping one hand on the man’s shoulder, Perturabo grabbed his hip and lifted the hapless officer up high, raised his own leg and brought the man’s back down hard on his armoured knee, breaking it like a stick.

  He threw the dead man down and looked around wildly, as if he would see the solution to his predicament hiding in the corner. He fell into a crouch, the posture of a half-man about to strike. The bearing of a noble primarch left him, and the light of insanity danced behind his eyes.

  The Iron Warriors hands tightened involuntarily on their guns. Golg took cautious steps back. Harkor looked over his shoulder for an avenue of escape. Forrix stood paralysed. Every man and woman on the command deck stopped dead, tasks forgotten. Only the servitors worked on, mindlessly burbling status reports or action queries.

  Tension built unbearably, worse than an approaching storm. They were like meat beasts trapped in the cage of a raging ambull. Not one among them expected to leave alive.

  Their looks of fear and the reactions of his sons cleared Perturabo’s mind. For a moment, he considered flying into them and killing them all. The rational part of him that he had spent so many years cultivating teetered on the brink of destruction, but then recovered. He could not drown the shame this news brought in blood.

  His rage passed, a thunderhead rolling away without delivering the promised rain. He sagged. The dead officer’s terrified face stared up from the deck. Perturabo stared back, lost for words. An awful, sucking ache pulsed in his chest, as if his hearts had been removed and replaced with nothingness.

  Disbelief and shame threatened to destroy him. He screwed his eyes shut.

  ‘Inform me when Captain Thesuger lands,’ he said quietly. ‘I will receive him in my command chamber alone.’

  He turned to go, head bowed. He stopped and looked back at his communications officers.

  ‘Tell him he has nothing to fear.’

  THIRTEEN

  OLYMPIA INVESTED

  000.M31

  OLYMPIA

  The 125th Expeditionary Fleet came screaming out of the warp well within the system bounds of Olympia. Away from the safety of the Mandeville point, their arrival tore a hole in the fabric of space that would never properly heal. Tortured by the sudden imposition of the system’s gravity fields, the heavy cruiser Agamemnon succumbed to the damage that had been inflicted by the hrud and detonated upon arrival, a brief supernova that signalled to the Olympians that the Lord of Iron had returned home.

  A thousand legionaries were on board, yet Perturabo spared no glance for the b
right flare of their death, ordering his fleet to make directly for Olympia without delay. His ships arrayed into a planetfall spearhead, the primarch returned home at full speed.

  Forrix arrived upon the command deck to find his fellow triarchs already there. A host of warsmiths and captains had assembled around the pit of the hololith. The soft light of ersatz planet-shine bathed their faces. Darkness cloaked their backs thickly, and shadows they would never shake were at their heels.

  Perturabo stood head and shoulders over the mightiest of his sons. Surrounded by the dull steel of his Legion’s war-plate, he was a lone mountain towering from a plain of iron skulls.

  The command deck of a Space Marine warship was a noisy place. Officers, human and transhuman, gave orders. Vox reports came in from all over the vessel and from the fleet. Muttered data-streams issued from the biomechanical mouths of servitors. Machinery of every kind compressed the air with their quiet work songs: the whisper of coolant systems, the progressive chiming of system notifications, the whir of cogs and data-spools, the huffing of life support, the click of banks of indication lights. And presiding over it all, the key theme in the great melody of a starship’s symphony, the distant throbbing of the engines that penetrated every atom of a man until the vibration became a part of his bones.

  Over that was the sharper, more urgent humming of a hundred battleplate reactors crammed together. Virtually silent alone, their combined voices made a buzzsaw whine that settled uncomfortably around the teeth.

  Forrix moved quietly to the front of the crowd. His brothers stepped grudgingly aside as they saw who tapped at their shoulders. Despite the noise, and the look of intense, almost insane concentration on Perturabo’s face, the primarch sensed his approach and turned to look directly at him.

  ‘You arrive, Forrix,’ he said. ‘How went the inspection?’

  The grand hololith was dominated by a true-pict representation of Olympia and her attendant satellites. The remainder of the resupply fleet were in high anchor, broadsides turned planetwards. Despite the threat in its sky, the world turned lazily. Stepped ranks of mountain ranges dominated the surface, twisted by tectonic activity into fractured lines like formations of soldiers taking part in a complicated display drill. Basins cupped small green-blue seas. Thousands of lakes were trapped in the arrowheads of high valleys. Olympia was a naked world, its rocky skin showing sandy grey and brown, but it wore enough green to cover its modesty. Sparse forests shrouded mountain flanks. Emerald slashes were long valleys of fertile land.

  White was the final predominate colour, evident in wisps of cloud curling around mountain ranges and spun into small storms by the thrusting landscape, and in the ice capping the highest peaks and the poles. Here and there were brownish stains in the sky over concentrations of industry, but it was not a ruined world, not yet.

  Forrix looked upon it and felt profoundly sad: for what he had once been, for what he had become and for what his lord would ask him to do. Violence was the only possible outcome here Harkor and Golg stood either side of the primarch. There was a space around them, as if they were surrounded by an invisible shield that kept the others back. Forrix stepped within this orbit, and he felt the tension emanating from his master.

  ‘Seven grand battalions are prepared, as you requested, my lord,’ said Forrix. They stand ready for deployment. All craft are assembled aboard the embarkation decks of the Iron Blood, Grand Megera, Vengeance of Ptolos and the Ferric Tyrant.

  ‘Good,’ said Perturabo. In the blue-green light of the simulated Olympia, the hollows of his face were shadowed black, making him appear cadaverous. A furious light burned in his blue eyes. Their coldness had become so intense it burned.

  ‘What is the plan?’ asked Forrix with great foreboding.

  ‘You know what I am going to do, Forrix. I am going to teach them that no one defies Perturabo.’

  ‘That you ask suggests you disagree with our lord’s ruling, Forrix,’ said Harkor snidely.

  ‘I prefer not to make assumptions,’ said Forrix, tired of his constant sniping.

  Harkor wore his helmet, but Golg was bareheaded, and the greedy sneer on his face disturbed Forrix. Golg was of lower birth than Harkor or himself, and behaved so. What remembered slights did he hope to avenge?

  Forrix checked himself before he looked back at the other officers to judge their mood. Any show of dissent would be punished brutally. Forrix had long been Perturabo’s favourite; he had kept the position by knowing that he was not immune to his lord’s temper.

  For the first time in an age, Forrix was unsure. He put the metal to the stone where his lord commanded, no matter when or where. But the stone here was that of his home. The metal would sunder the flesh of his kin before it bit into its target. Perturabo was in a murderous rage. Forrix had no hope that the primarch would see sense and the bloodshed might be slight. He could try to reason with his lord, but that might well end with his own death. Forrix had no desire to die, though the thought did not unduly trouble him. He had been made a living weapon, and the Emperor used his tools hard. Forrix had resigned himself to dying a long time ago.

  He did, however, have a choice in how he would end. Further complicating his feelings was the fact that, although the thought of attacking their home world sickened him, he could not, no matter how he hard he tried, convince himself that the primarch was wrong.

  Data tags appended to the world and its orbitals swam around the display. Pre-action markers. There had never been any doubt that it would come to war. The sea of red data-screed - scrolling, blinking or frozen according to Perturabo’s whim - settled it.

  ‘Summon the master of the high watch,’ ordered Perturabo.

  A muted confirmation came from the communications array banking up the rear wall of the command deck. Olympia disappeared. An unhelmeted warrior appeared in its place He would have been waiting for the summons, probably ever since the fleet breached real space. His expression was studiously blank. In the striped light of hololith projection ribbons, he looked like a corpse.

  ‘Captain Atrax,’ said Perturabo stonily. ‘Report.’

  ‘My lord! said Atrax, ‘I see Captain Thesuger succeeded in his mission and has brought you home. It is with great joy that I see you arrive here. The situation upon the planet’s Efface is unfortunate, but now you have returned I believe it can be resolved swiftly. I— ‘What happened?’ interrupted Perturabo. ‘Tell me in as few words as you can manage, captain.’

  The captain blinked. ‘Governor Dammekos died three months ago, my lord. Within weeks, the succession was disputed. Small-scale fighting broke out between some of the cities. When Captain Thesuger’s fleet arrived to collect the recruits, there was no central authority to communicate with, and our demands for supplies were denied. I set the resupply fleet here to guard the system and sent Thesuger to fetch you. In the interim, I have received delegations from many of the factions. They are coalescing into a number of power blocks that—’

  Again, Perturabo interrupted. ‘And you did nothing? There are five hundred Iron Warriors aboard the orbitals, the ships and upon the planet. You stood idle while all this went on?’

  The primarch sounded reasonable. Everyone that heard his voice knew the tone for a lie The captain’s hesitation was minute but telling. He stood straighten ‘We threatened action, my lord. But we did not wish to act hastily. There is a large secessionist element on the planet, but their opposition is by no means unified. Only some wish to secede, but all of them demand change. If we had appeared to side with one faction over another, I calculated that the planet would slide rapidly into full-blown civil war. We have blockaded Olympia, and the orbitals remain in our hands! You judge this sufficient discharge of your duties?’

  ‘I… Yes, my lord, I do. This is not some minor acquisition, but our home world. I judged it best to proceed with caution. ‘

  ‘Caution?’ said Perturabo. The Imperium was not won by caution, Captain Atrax. You have performed poorly. You are to relinquish command i
mmediately to your lieutenants and report to me aboard the Iron Blood!

  Atrax’s face remained blank. ‘As you command, my lord’.

  Forrix doubted very much that Atrax would survive the encounter. ‘Show me Olympia again,’, commanded Perturabo. Atrax disappeared. Frequency tether bulbs pulsed off. The projection ribbons whooped and Olympia again hung serenely in the false void conjured by the hololith.

  For long moments Perturabo stared at his adopted world. When he turned to look at Forrix, the primarch’s decision was written across his face.

  ‘Triarch Forrix, send word to the cities of our home world. We will meet them in parlay, under the flag of Eirene.’ Perturabo passed a scroll to Forrix before returning his gaze to the hololithic representation of Olympia. ‘These are my instructions. See they are carried out to the letter.’

  ‘As you command, my lord,’ said Forrix. His hearts were sick with misgiving, but he was wise enough to keep that to himself.

  Within sight of Kardis stood the great peak of the Adarine. Other mountains exceeded it in height, but few did in beauty. The Adarine’s head was close to a perfect pyramid; three sheer sides of grey rock lined with delicate strata picked out in ice and snow were set above broad shoulders covered in dense, fragrant pine forest They called the peak ‘the Old Man’, for it looked like an elder swathed in a heavy cloak of green.

  Upon the Adarine’s shoulders, Perturabo set his camp. His engineers felled a patch of forest, removing the thin soil and levelling a two-hundred-metre circle of the ground to within a millimetre of perfect flatness. Curious mountain dwellers - the herders and hunters of the forest - were drawn by the towers of smoke roaring upwards from the Iron Warriors’ fusion cutters and rock saws. The Legion ignored them. Perturabo ordered steps cut into the mountainside leading down to the highway over two thousand metres below. This was the great road of Pellekontia, the same road he had taken to Kardis many years ago when he had set out on his quest to unite the world.