Saturnine

by Dan Abnett

  The screaming aura had been named the Sonance. It had already blown out Oanis’ audio systems. It was shredding the vox. It was beginning to vibrate the wall’s aegis envelope like a crystal glass set singing by a fingertip.

  Laudatory vents, their sweeping gold mouths wide open like the blooms of pitcher plants, sang siren-calls of discord and despair. Amplifiers swelled dark, sub-vocal groans of bereavement and misery on infrasonic waves. The roar of the carnodon contains frequencies of less than twenty hertz, below the threshold of human hearing, but the effects are still felt. The consequence is paralysing terror, pinning the prey. The prattling tattle-tales of the Slaaneshi feverdreams had gibbered this secret to the Kakophoni too, and the Emperor’s Children had made fluted auramite horns, which sounded a dirge that provoked cold-sweat, inescapable dread.

  Madius shuddered. He was newborn and untried, but he was resolved. He couldn’t understand why he was faltering. He turned, and saw that Auxilia units drawn up on the broad platform of the wall top were breaking and scattering, fleeing for the back steps and delivery ramps, dropping their weapons. Some had fallen, weeping.

  ‘Stop them! Kask, stop them!’ he yelled. ‘Discipline! Line order!’

  He felt a shockwave, a concussive rush of pressure. Sections of the aegis above them had failed, and collapsed. The voids were tearing like thin silk. Immediately, enemy fire penetrated. Mega-bolter sprays raked the bulwark. Pulses of heavy las struck the alure, the fighting step and the rear parapet. Men were hurled into the air in geysers of flame. A plasma beam lanced in, and obliterated a gun turret entirely.

  ‘Maintain barrage!’ Madius yelled, but no one could hear him. The air was screaming around him. He ran towards the fire control station.

  Approaching the wall, the striding Donjons dropped their voids. They began to take crippling damage immediately along their forward hulls, but it no longer mattered. They were less than a kilometre out. launch units mounted on the platforms’ decks began to fire, pitching drop pods into the air. Some were deflected by the shredding voids Others were incinerated by the firmer sections of the shields. But many arced down onto the wall top, cratering the rockcrete as they impacted, claw legs dragging and gouging.

  Some struck the face of the wall, and fell, but then clung on, their landing claws becoming bristled hooks and grotesque arachnid legs. They began to climb the sheer wall like mites, or haul themselves into the open maws of mid-tier gun-boxes.

  Many plunged to the foot of the Saturnine Wall. They rolled on the broken waste of the foreland, righted themselves, then sprouted then Neverbred legs, and began to scuttle back up the wall like huntsman spiders.

  Emperor’s Children were emerging on the wall top, purple, gold, pink, black, screaming their death hymns, and blasting their weapons. The Imperial Fists turned from the wall, hammering bolter fire at the disgorging drop pods, cutting down the arriving enemy, and being cut down in turn.

  Madius’ boltgun was in his hand. He snapped off shots at nearby targets.

  ‘Hardline! Hardline!’ he yelled through the doorway of fire control. ‘Still trying to re-establish the link!’ a technician yelled back at him. Sonic booms rolled across Oanis like thundercracks. Pockets of darkness popped open along the fighting platform, and figures dropped out of fissures that sound had warped and torn.

  The champion elite of the III. Warriors too beautiful and ornamented to behold. They fell out of the warp fissures, which crumpled and closed behind them like the petals of black roses, then vanished like smoke, leaving only lingering snatches of choral plainsong behind them.

  The figures fell, graceful, and landed on the wall on their feet, at a pace no quicker than a fast walk.

  One dropped directly in the centre of the wide wall deck. It was larger than the rest, clad in a panoply of artificer armour, wrought in heliotrope and amaranthine, etched in gold. It landed in a crouch, its right hand clutching a slender, two-handed, single-edged blade.

  Fulgrim rose slowly to his feet. His long white hair unwound, and ribboned out behind him in the night wind, like a pennant of shining satin.

  He tipped his head back, beheld the devastation, and smiled.

  * * *

  In grinding darkness, they sat unspeaking, strapped in tightly, shaking with every jolt and scrape, as the assault drill’s cutters gripped and cut and burrowed through the flaw’s friable shale core. The only light was the red glow of the compartment’s overheads. The roar of the tunnelling process was loud and harsh, a grating clatter and scrape as broken rock spoil was devoured, spat past them, and expelled.

  Horus Aximand thought he could hear the breathing again, but it was just the men around him in the tight space. It was claustrophobic, imprisoning. It reminded him too much of the choking, pressing darkness he dreamed of all too often.

  There was no vox. The rock was too thick. He wished he could ask Abaddon for an update, but the First Captain was aboard a separate drill.

  Aximand glanced at Serac Lukash, his second. The man was a newborn, freshly raised to the ranks of the Sons of Horus, but from the set of his features, he was no doubt a son of Horus. Not a son like Aximand. A son of Horus as he currently was.

  ‘How long?’ Aximand asked.

  ‘Auspex estimates sixteen minutes to breakthrough, lord,’ Lukash replied.

  ‘Get set,’ said Aximand.

  * * *

  ‘Trickster, this is Trickster? Vigil, can you respond?’

  Elg’s patient repetition had become a near-mantra in the command post.

  ‘Still nothing, my lord,’ she said. Red runes were blinking on the station desk that monitored wall action. That said enough. Though the link was down, Dorn knew that the defence systems of the Saturnine Wall, from Oanis west, had engaged with full force. They were repelling a major assault.

  ‘Target tracks?’ he asked.

  ‘We are continuing to receive track evaluations from the Grand Borealis, my lord,’ Elg replied. ‘Significant track patterns, bulk mass. It could be engines at the wall line. We’re certainly reading drone tracks consistent with multiple tread vehicles. And ripple-echoes from detonations.’

  ‘But all at the surface?’

  She nodded.

  ‘No sub-surface tracks?’ Dorn pressed.

  ‘It’s possible,’ she replied. ‘We are trying to separate the noise to determine that, but the surface track and accompanying acoustic is so considerable, it’s masking any potential sub-surface pattern. To be honest, I don’t understand the background noise level. Even bulk assault shouldn’t-‘

  ‘My lord!’ an operator called out. ‘Hardline link re-established.’

  Dorn snatched up the vox-mic.

  ‘Vigil! This is Trickster! Make report!’

  The voice on the other end was swallowed in a jumble of static and distortion.

  ‘Vigil, repeat that!’ Dorn snapped. He glanced at Elg. ‘Amplify the signal!’

  ‘-ster! Trickster, this is vigil!’

  ‘Madius. What is going on?’

  ‘Full assault, my lord. The Third Legion. Shields are ruptured. They are on the wall.’

  ‘Vigil, what strength?’ Dorn asked. ‘Report the Third Legion strength.’

  ‘Full Legion strength, my lord.’

  Dorn looked at Sindermann, and then at Elg. Full Legion strength. The Emperor’s Children were rumoured to have more than a hundred thousand legionaries in their ranks.

  ‘Advise the Grand Borealis,’ Dorn said to Elg. ‘If Madius is correct, we will need to effect immediate recomposition of the battle sphere.’

  His mind began to race. A full Legion force. What could they spare? What could they move? They were already stretched to snapping point. Nothing could be withdrawn from Colossi or Gorgon. The rest of the Anterior Barbican line was beset from Marmax south, expecting worse, and could not be diluted.

  He’d already sacrificed the Eternity Wall space port to make this happen.

  The vox in
his hand crackled again.

  ‘Trickster, Trickster, can you hear me?’

  ‘This is Trickster, Madius.’

  ‘Trickster, he’s here.’

  ‘Say again, vigil,’ said Dorn.

  ‘He’s here, my lord. The Phoenician.’

  TWO

  * * *

  The wounded tower

  Potential prize or actual

  Small weather

  Katillon guntower had begun to collapse.

  Weak from the grand assault the day before, it had been further wounded by the renewed brutality of the traitor assault. Sections of the upper platform and armoured mantling had shorn away, and many of the gun-boxes had become burning sockets. Fafnir Rann was certain that the entire structure would fall in the next ten or fifteen minutes, if the current intensity of assault was sustained.

  If it fell, slumping and disintegrating under its own pummelled weight, it would tear down a segment of the fourth circuit wall.

  And then the enemy would be in.

  The Iron Warriors’ mode of prosecution had been twin-headed, just as the Great Angel had expected. Two mass assaults – two determined escalades, sheltered under armoured sows and rolling belfries – were driving up either side of the tower, while petrary engines rained down destruction from a distance, and numberless subhuman hordes harried the entire length of the circuit wall to force a locked defence.

  Rann admired it. He was a son of Dorn, an Imperial Fist, and siege war was their fundamental doctrine. This was how you broke a fortress down: prolonged erosion of the defensive lines, sustained and exhausting general assaults, and then surgical escalade, driving brute force against whatever part had revealed itself as vulnerable.

  Ironic, that Katillon’s structural weakness should have been the result of the defence’s own savage thwarting of the foe the day before. They had, against all odds, broken back a storm force that should have overwhelmed the entire Bar, but Katillon had suffered in the numbing tumult.

  It was no surprise. Rann had known from the start that the greatest test his Imperial Fists would face would be Perturabo’s Legion, their only genuine rivals in this method of warfare. He hated them, but he appreciated their skill. In the heart of the fight, it seemed like mindless rampage, but it was ordered and purposeful, like a stonemason expertly applying the full force of his hammer and chisel against the one groove in a granite block that would split it.

  He had, from his vantage, identified two of their leaders. Ormon Gundar and Bogdan Mortel, both chieftain warsmiths, both infamous from the Great Crusade for their deeds of sack and ruination.

  He aimed to kill both of them.

  They were the drivers of the assault. They had engineered the work thus far, and brought their forces through three circuit walls. Now they strained for the triumph, moving up from the backlines to join the assault they had masterminded, to taste glory first-hand. Take them down, and you killed the minds orchestrating the plan: you killed the brain, so the body flopped; you took the hammer and chisel to the granite. The Gorgon Bar garrison could not hope to match the invaders man for man, not even with the Lord of Baal at their side, and the Great Angel’s lack of visibility was deeply troubling. The last time Rann had seen him, the Lord Sanguinius had seemed deathly sick, and tormented. If they lost him, if the Great Angel could not stand…

  Rann shoved the thought from his mind. They were in the jaws of death, but if they took down the enemy host’s conducting chieftains, the traitors might lose cohesion, and respite could still be won.

  A fine enough theory. The practice was different. The onslaught was so intense, it had him fixed, fetching assaulter after assaulter off the parapet and ladders with his axes. It was trying to hold back an ocean surge that was about to pour over a sea wall. And Rann was not at full strength. He still carried the pain and wounds of the battle at the Lion’s Gate space port. He did not know if he was capable of breaking out and executing the decisive action.

  But the theory was sound. Just as Gundar and Mortel drove the enemy’s attack, so too he could devise and drive others to execute.

  Halen and his squads were a hundred metres away, as choked as he was. He saw them braced, heard them firing bolters on full-auto. An unthinkable expenditure of ammunition, utterly decried, except in extremis. Sepatus was gone, for reasons Rann did not understand. He hadn’t seen the Great Angel in an hour. Furio, then, or Aimery, or Lux. Backed by the might of their bright blades, maybe he could…

  Rann hacked a path along the fighting step, smashing Iron Warriors backwards off the shell-shot crenellations, kicking out ladders as they slammed against the stone. His squads flowed with him, covering the stretch, shields chipping as they took shots and deflected missiles. Emhon Lux was closest, leading his company in a defence of the balustrade, below Katillon’s south side.

  As he fought, Rann opened his vox.

  ‘Lux!’

  ‘Rann, good brother!’

  ‘I am close!’

  ‘I see you!’

  ‘I need your sword with mine, brother! We take their chiefs!’

  ‘In this? Fafnir, are you insane?’ Lux replied. Then Rann heard him laugh. ‘Where do we begin?’

  Rann buried both axes in the chest of a Cataphractii Terminator, wrenched them out one by one, and shouldered the corpse off the step.

  ‘Katillon north side!’ he yelled. ‘Where their towers have drawn up! We’ll use their own damn ramps to-‘

  A granite projectile, as large as a Land Raider, and launched by one of the Stor-Bezashk trebuchets, struck the upper side of Katillon guntower. Masonry spilled down in a vast cascade of floury dust. The entire south half of the wounded tower top caved in, and collapsed, raining stone and men and ragged scraps of gun-mount. The projectile had made no sound until its impact. The tower’s collapse drowned everything in an awful, earthquake rumble.

  Sundered stone fell across the south side wall, buckling the bulwark and parapet. An immense section of sliding tower hit the wall like a guillotine blade, exploded into fragments, and toppled sideways into the yards and glacis behind the wall, crushing hundreds wailing on the ramps. Another section slid forward and plunged in one piece down the face of the tower, wiping it clean of scaling Iron Warriors and siege belfry bridges. A rearing siege belfry, battered and mangled by the fall of stone, twisted, tilted and pitched backwards into the enemy host.

  The enormous dust cloud lifted by the tower’s collapse choked the air for hundreds of metres on the south side wall. It rolled out slowly, leisurely, coating everything, blinding everyone. Stones and loose nibble were still pattering down. Rann struggled forward through the swirling dust. He came upon an Iron Warrior, who had been dropped to his hands and knees by a falling slab. He was trying to rise. Rann took his arm, hauled him to his feet, and then put an axe through his spine. In Fair War, you did not put a man down like a dog when he was fallen. You let him stand, no matter what kind of man he had become.

  A few metres on, he found Lux. The petrary boulder that had decapitated Katillon, still entirely intact, had dropped onto the wall top. It had crushed Emhon Lux beneath it.

  He was still alive. He lay on his back, his legs crushed under the rock. Stone dust caked his face and plate like fine powder, making the blood leaking from his mouth more livid. His eyes and mouth were wide open, in an attitude of surprise.

  No time for words. Rann couldn’t shift the rock, alone. He turned, as dark warriors of the IV came scrambling over the parapet in the haze, and began to swing at them, keeping them back from Lux’s helpless form.

  ‘Emhon! Emhon!’ he yelled as he struck away shield and blade, and dug axe-edge into ceramite and bone. There were three on him now, four. Seven. Ten. ‘Emhon, tell me! Where is the Great Angel? We need him now!’

  The only answer, a wet gurgle from Lux’s blood-flooded throat.

  ‘Lux!’ Rann roared. ‘Where is Lord Sanguinius? Where is the Great Angel?’

  * * * />
  Dorn had summoned the commanders of the Helios and Devotion kill teams. He spoke with them in the hall outside the command post. Thane listened, solemn. Sigismund took it as well as Dorn had expected him to.

  ‘Are we abandoning this strategy?’ Sigismund asked.

  ‘No,’ said Dorn. ‘But we are obligated to adjust. Assemble your teams, and follow me to the wall top.’

  ‘So the enemy has dismayed you?’ Sigismund pressed.

  ‘The enemy is the enemy,’ said Dorn, not rising to Sigismund’s scathing tone. ‘We can continue here, waiting in expectation of a possibility, or we can move in response to an actuality. The wall is assaulted. I he defenders need immediate reinforcement.’

  ‘Do you believe this is the foe’s design, my lord?’ Thane asked. ‘A full strike at the surface defence?’

  ‘I do not,’ said Dorn. ‘It shows none of Perturabo’s skill. It exploits nothing of the secret weakness that makes Saturnine the place to strike.’

  ‘So the real strike is still coming?’ Thane asked.

  ‘I consider it likely.’

  ‘Why, then we wait and hold!’ Sigismund snapped. ‘This is the very prize we-‘

  ‘Lose that tone, Sigismund,’ said Dorn. ‘I have told you my command. We either wait here for a possible prize, or we go aloft where a genuine one has manifested. Not the prize we expected or even hoped for, but a serious trophy none the less.’

  ‘But-‘

  ‘But nothing,’ said Dorn. ‘Wall Master Madius reports that Fulgrim brings his entire host. Unchecked, they could break the Ultimate Wall. Is that something you’d allow?’

  ‘No,’ said Sigismund.

  ‘Is Fulgrim… a distraction, lord?’ asked Thane. ‘You told us you anticipated a wall-face assault as a distraction?’

  ‘If he is, he’s a distraction bigger and bolder than anything we might have imagined,’ Dorn replied. ‘We make our best predictions. We adjust appropriately when we see reality unfold in actual time.’