Saturnine

by Dan Abnett

  In the heart of it, the Great Khan. Almost unassailable in his might, but the greatest focus of the traitor wrath. He had dared to come among them, to enter their heart. He had wounded them savagely, broken the day’s assault, but it would cost him. His was the trophy-head they most desired, the unthinkable kill they suddenly craved. A chance, an opportunity no traitor heart had dared imagine.

  They swarmed.

  But to take their prize, they had to kill him, and Jaghatai Khan was not in the mood to meet death. The vast and feral melee in the traitor back-lines was not a dismal misadventure to end a glorious cavalry action. It was just the far-point of the rush, the true price demanded of the enemy when the charge began.

  Rule five: if you have driven through the enemy mass, turn and charge them again from the rear.

  The Khan swung his dao, cutting through armour like fat. The war-calls of Chogoris bellowed from his lips, drowned out by the impossible deluge of the battle.

  Yet they were heard.

  Jetbikes gunned. Engines rose at the sound of other engines shrieking. Bikes turned, ramming through bodies, swinging sideways to fell others with deliberate and brutal sideswipes of the flanks and rear ends.

  The White Scars broke back. One by one at first, following the Khan’s lead, then en masse, breaking free, accelerating, retracing their rush back to the wall. They turned high to break out, but then swept low again prow-rams, chattering gun mounts and raking blades slaughtering any who had survived their outward run, or any who had been foolish enough to try and surge in at their backs.

  Almost as many traitors fell to the rear-charge as had died during the in-rush.

  The White Scars raced towards the rear of the shield wall. Kharash riders split sideways as they approached the shields, running the length of it, tossing saddle charges into the unprotected backs of the massive field tractors.

  None had been set with more than a cursory fuse. The mines began to detonate, some only seconds after the Kharash rider had sped past. Tractor mounts blew up, shearing apart in searing clouds of flame, bodywork splaying, stanchions fracturing, frames collapsing, engines bursting, splintered axles spinning clear from each inferno.

  Shield sections fell. They remained, true to their construction, for the most part intact. But, torn from their supporting frames, they toppled forward flat into the mud, a wall no longer.

  Eight tractors died. The advancing rampart was broken, like a broad smile with teeth missing, black smoke swilling from the gaps. The White Scars burned through the heavy smoke, taking full advantage of the clear passage provided by the annihilated sections. Some Kharash paused as they turned out of their breaking action, halting to haul fallen or wounded brothers up onto the bikes beside them Yetto of the Kharash found Kherta Kai still alive, drenched in gore, standing alone with enemy dead heaped around him. He pulled him onto the flank of his steed, and bore him out of hell.

  Burr saw the first riders punch out of the seething smoke. He started to cry out, a whoop of joy and shock, but it died in his throat. There could only be a few of them. The glory of the charge had gone into the darkest pit of the enemy. Precious little could return from that.

  But more appeared. Then more still. Not all, but a startling number. Dozens. Hundreds. Their return ride, harried by parting shots from a wounded enemy mass, had little of the original discipline in its formation, but formal discipline no longer mattered. Some riders were wounded. Others, running more slowly, carried wounded men with them, clinging to the sides, or even held limp across the hulls in front of the saddles.

  ‘I’m dreaming, surely,’ Burr murmured. He looked at Raldoron. ‘How could any of them have survived? Not just any, but so many?’

  ‘Are you awake, Konas?’ Raldoron asked. He had removed his helm, and was staring out at the ruined enemy line and the returning riders. There was no expression on his face.

  ‘I am, lord,’ said Burr. ‘I’m sure I am.’

  ‘Then know, you have seen the White Scars do what the White Scars do,’ said Raldoron. ‘It is rare for any to witness it. I confess, I have relished it every time I’ve been lucky enough to watch it happen.’

  ‘It’s not…’ Burr began. ‘This isn’t a game! A… display!’

  ‘No,’ Raldoron agreed. ‘It never is. And certainly not here, in this time of darkness. What you just saw, Konas, was fortune favouring us for the day. But you should still enjoy it for what it was. Great art must be appreciated, no matter the situation.’

  The first riders were approaching the outworks.

  The entire cavalry action had lasted six minutes.

  * * *

  ‘I’ll go no further,’ said Horus Aximand.

  Abaddon glanced at him. ‘Why? Are you afraid he’ll refuse?’ he asked.

  ‘No’.

  ‘Then have you changed your mind?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Aximand. ‘He does not like me, nor I, him. Better you make the approach.’

  Abaddon glowered. ‘He is focused, these days,’ he said. ‘No interest in old scores, no time for it. You saw that yourself. We have unity, Aximand. Cohesion of thought and purpose. Old feuds are dead.’

  ‘Even so, I shall stay here,’ said Little floras. ‘I will not risk opening old wounds. Speak to him. You, I think, he still admires.’

  Abaddon nodded. ‘Tell me you still trust the sense in this?’ he said.

  ‘I do. The Mournival will back you. I’ll see to that.’

  Abaddon turned away. ‘Stay here then, and wait for me.’

  The great vaults of the Lion’s Gate space port rose above them, almost devoid of light. The vast structure creaked and moaned, Stressed by the sheer weight of the materiel flowing down through it every minute of every hour, every freight lifter and cargo platform running at capacity. This was their artery, through which the life-blood of their war pumped from orbit to surface.

  Down through which the first tides of the Neverborn were ranning in an immaterial river.

  Aximand watched his brother walk away into the gloom, footsteps ringing from the plate deck. He didn’t want to stay, but he would. He was uneasy. It wasn’t the skin-prickle of the malaetheric vapour flooding the place, nor was it his proximity to the Lord of Iron. These last few nights, since the port broke, the dreams had started again: dreams in his sleep and in waking moments too, dreams he hadn’t had in months.

  Breathing, someone was close. Close but unseen. Someone was coming for him. The dreams, which had started around the time of the Dwell undertaking, had bothered him until he had engaged with them, and seen, at last, the face of the someone: Loken… Loken, Loken. He’d put the dreams to rest, exorcised.

  Now, they were back, the soft sound of breathing just behind his head. What was his imagined menace now?

  He stood alone, Abaddon now out of sight.

  ‘Go away,’ he whispered, ‘or let me face you. Either way, I’ll cut you down.’ The breathing did not change its soft rhythm. Aximand wanted to leave, but he knew the breathing would be with him wherever he went.

  ‘Tell me where,’ he whispered.

  Nothing replied.

  * * *

  The battle-automata blocked his path, silent and huge.

  ‘I would speak with him,’ said Abaddon.

  They didn’t move.

  ‘You know me,’ Abaddon said. ‘I would speak with him.’

  A subsonic murmur, a command. They stepped aside.

  Abaddon entered the chamber, a command station for docking control, twenty kilometres up the spire of the port. Vast observation windows on three sides, clouded with soot. The pale sub-orbital twilight spilling in, illuminating a derelict control centre where a thousand port officers had once run the daily business of the port. A cold blue gloom revealed ruined console stations, the wreckage of fallen monitors and overturned desks on the deck. On the corner of one console, a ceramic caffeine cup, half-full, miraculously still stood where it had been put down weeks or months
before. Put down between sips, waiting to be picked up again.

  ‘The contents of my last briefing haven’t altered,’ said Perturabo. ‘I would have informed you. Why are you here?’

  ‘To speak to you,’ said Abaddon.

  The Lord of Iron had retired for the evening, and taken himself to the quiet of this dead area, alone. Abaddon thought that odd. When did Perturabo’s work cease? His vigilance, his constant moderation of the battle sphere.

  ‘I thought to find you below,’ said Abaddon, ‘at your station.’

  Perturabo sat off to his left. He had stripped away his armour. The implacable panoply of the Logos plate waited nearby, arranged systematically by the battle-automata on a ready rack, like a specimen of some titanic beetle genus, pin-spread for display by an entomologist. Stripped to the waist, Perturabo was still massive. His flesh was almost white, pocked by the circular punctum of plug sockets and the shadows of old scars, slabbed with brute muscles. He sat on a cargo crate, elbows resting on an unpowered strategium table on which a large, paper chart of the Palace had been spread and weighted down with bolter shells. A few small lamps and candles burned.

  ‘I have withdrawn,’ said Perturabo.

  ‘From what?’

  ‘From the data, First Captain, not the engagement. It’s a trick I learned. You’re disturbing me.’

  ‘I apologise,’ said Abaddon. He didn’t leave. He stepped from the upper range of extinct consoles onto the main floor, and approached the table. His feet crunched over shards of armourglass and chips of spalled metal.

  ‘From whom?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘This trick. What is it?’

  Perturabo turned his giant head to gaze at Abaddon. Pure disdain. Somehow, unarmoured, he looked more terrifying, more capable of rising up like a seismic convulsion and annihilating the First Captain.

  ‘I learned it from my brother Rogal Dorn,’ he said. ‘I trust that suitably amuses you, Abaddon.’

  ‘I’d like to know it,’ said Abaddon.

  ‘Data,’ said Perturabo, as if that were an answer in itself. ‘Vast amounts, in any battle, any war. In this… you can imagine the scale. ‘

  ‘I can.’

  ‘It must be reviewed, monitored, moderated, modified,’ said Perturabo. ‘Constantly. When I was younger, I bent myself to that task. Unstinting. I would not leave the strategium or the noospheric uploads for a moment until the action was complete. I never took my eyes off the game.’

  ‘I’ve seen you do it,’ said Abaddon. ‘And few can begin to do it like you.’

  ‘One can,’ said Perturabo. ‘Test exercises, nine times, he beat me. This was in the early days. I couldn’t fathom how. Do you know what I did?’

  ‘No, lord.’

  ‘I asked him,’ said Perturabo. He made a sound, a grating sound, that Abaddon realised was a rueful, perhaps melancholy chuckle. ‘I asked him, Abaddon. We were brothers then. Such interactions were possible.’

  ‘And?’ asked Abaddon.

  ‘He told me… and understand this, he was willing. He was glad to share a technique with me. He told me that data can blind. The weight of it. The burden of detail. Especially if one engages with it without a break or rest.’

  Perturabo looked at the chart rolled out in front of him.

  ‘He told me he had learned to step away,’ he said. ‘Step away, even at the height of conflict, if you can believe that? To clear his mind and focus, to shed the extraneous and the superficial. To contemplate. To reduce the immeasurable complexity of the arithmetic down to simple principles. Thus renewed, he would return. Do you know what he would do then?’

  ‘No, lord.’

  ‘He would win, Abaddon. The bastard would win.’

  ‘He has a talent,’ said Abaddon.

  ‘He does’, replied Perturabo. ‘I am the first to admit it. Only a fool ignores the advice of a brilliant man. Only an idiot denies the good practice of an enemy. I took up the habit. Intense moderation, as had been my way, but then short periods of withdrawal. Entirely unlinked. No augur-feed, no noospherics. He was right. The objective tactical clarity is astonishing.’

  Abaddon approached the table, and looked down at the old chart.

  ‘This is clarity?’ he asked.

  ‘It is. Sixteen thousand, four hundred and eighty-six individual engagements as of the last hour mark. Or ten thousand, nine hundred ninety, if we use his scale. His definition of battle differs from mine. I measure by twenty thousand troops per element, he by thirty thousand. It’s merely a difference in doctrinal tradition.’

  Abaddon stared at the map. The thick bolter shells, red-tipped and brass collared, did more than weigh the map down. Four stood upright on the map, marking Lion’s Gate Port, Eternity Wall Port, Gorgon Bar and Colossi Gate.

  ‘Reduced to the most spare basics,’ said Abaddon.

  ‘Yes,’ said Perturabo ‘A paper chart with objects for markers. The old way’.

  ‘No, I mean…’ Abaddon gestured. ‘To the essential clashes. Sixteen thousand plus reduced to four.’

  Perturabo bad a bolter shell in his hands. He was toying with it

  ‘Yes, those four. They are the key to this phase. I keep considering placing this on Marmax.’ He pointed, with the shell, to the area of the map between Gorgon and Colossi in the Anterior Barbican. ‘But we won’t take Marmax yet. We can’t. It’s too strong, and insulated from the north by Colossi. Once my brothers are done with Colossi, we’ll roll through both, one after the other. We’ll level them on our way to the Sanctum wall.’

  He glanced up at Abaddon. ‘You see? You strip it all down to the barest essentials, and even the greatest battle ever fought is reduced to a simple series of steps. Why are you here, Abaddon? I hope you have not come to impart some private instruction from your genefather. Eh? Some whisper in my ear to do better and work faster? I don’t want to hear it. Tell him I am accomplishing what he has tasked me to accomplish.’

  ‘Lupercal is not aware of this visit,’ said Abaddon.

  Perturabo sat back. His brows knotted, intrigued. He studied Abaddon’s face for some clue.

  ‘I’m curious,’ he said. ‘You have my attention.’

  Abaddon didn’t reply. He reached over, picked up one of the bolter shells in use as an edge-weight, and carefully placed it on the map upright, just south of the Ultimate Wall. Then he stepped back, as though he had made a move in regicide, and was waiting for his opponent to respond.

  ‘The other day, you were the only one to notice that,’ said Perturabo. ‘To even understand it. You like it, don’t you?’

  ‘So do you, lord.’

  ‘Yes. But I told you. We are committed – four key, focus sites. Moreover, they satisfy the edicts of the Warmaster. They’ll get the job done.’

  ‘How quickly?’ asked Abaddon. ‘A month? Two? More? How soon before relief arrives and we begin a war on two fronts?’

  ‘Faster. Faster than two months,’ replied Perturabo, irritated. ‘This scheme works. The other is appealing. I will hold it in reserve.’

  ‘It’s more than appealing,’ said Abaddon. He looked around, spotted-another broken cargo crate, drew it over and sat down without invitation. ‘It’s a flaw. A vulnerability.’

  ‘He will have seen it.’

  ‘What if he hasn’t? Isn’t it exactly the kind of error you’re waiting for? The tiny oversight? It’s the error you’ve been praying he’ll make.’

  ‘Watch your mouth, Son of Horus.’

  Abaddon raised a hand. ‘But if it is? That flaw is the basis of a spear-tip assault. Done right, that would end this affair in a week.’

  Perturabo stared at him, and said nothing.

  ‘You saw it, my lord,’ said Abaddon. ‘You. It would make this triumph yours. The Triumph of Terra. By your command, not merely executed by you at my lord’s behest. That’s immortal glory. That’s a place above all of your brothers at the right hand of the new order-‘<
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  ‘I know what it is. Don’t try your flattery on me. Tell me this, why did you bring it to me?’

  ‘Because I saw it. Because I want it. It’s a military win.’

  Perturabo began to smirk. He could at last detect the hidden fire behind Abaddon’s eyes.

  ‘Oh ho, now I see it,’ he said. ‘You were always the warrior, a fine one I’ll confess. You want a piece of this glory too. You want to prove what you are. A soldier. Not a child of the warp. An Astartes.’

  ‘It’s what I’ve always been,’ said Abaddon. ‘I won’t lie. I want the story, and I want to win it with the skill of my blade and the superiority of my troops. As I did in the old days, as I have always done, as an Astartes. That is how the compliance of Terra should come. That’s what carried me here. And carried you too.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘No, perhaps about it,’ said Abaddon. ‘Tell me it wouldn’t be sweet. ‘For you, most of all. To settle the score. Brother against brother. You and him, decided warrior against warrior.’

  ‘I am going to win this, Abaddon. The rivalry will be decided in my favour at the last.’

  ‘I know you’re going to win. Eventually. Entirely. You will best Dorn. But it’s not the result. It’s the means. Surely? To beat him on his own terms. Astartes against Astartes. Military rules. The true crafts of war, pitted according to the games you’ve played against him so many times, and too often lost.’

  ‘I said watch your mouth-‘

  ‘I don’t think I will, because you know it’s a fact. Beat him this way, and no one can deny your supremacy. No one can say, “In the end, the Lord of Iron won, not because he was better, but because he had the warp at his side.”’