Galaxy in Flames

by Ben Counter

  Where to?' asked Sindermann.

  To safety,' replied Qruze. 'Loken asked me to look out for you and that's what I'm going to do. Now be silent and follow me.'

  Qruze turned on his heel and marched towards one of the many doors that led out of the audience chamber. Euphrati followed the warrior and SinВ­dermann and Mersadie trotted along after her, unsure as to where they were going or why. Qruze reached the door, a large portal of polished bronze guarded by two warriors, moving them aside with a chopping wave of his hand. 'I'm taking these ones below,’ he said. 'Our orders are that no one is to leave,' said one

  of the guards.

  'And I am issuing you new orders,’ said Qruze, a steely determination that Sindermann had not noticed earlier underpinning his words. 'Move aside, or are you disobeying the order of a superior

  officer?' 'No, sir,’ said the warriors, bowing and hauling

  open the bronze door.

  Qruze nodded to the guards and gestured that the four of them should pass through.

  Sindermann, Euphrati and Mersadie left the audiВ­ence chamber, the door slamming behind them with an awful finality. With the sounds of the dying planet and the gasps of shock suddenly cut off, the silence that enveloped them was positively unnervВ­ing.

  'Now what do we do?' asked Mersadie.

  'I get us as far away from the Vengeful Spirit as posВ­sible,’ answered Qruze.

  'Off the ship?' asked Sindermann.

  Yes,’ said Qruze. 'It is not safe for your kind now. Not safe at all,’

  TWELVE

  Cleansing

  Let the galaxy burn

  God Machine

  The screaming of the Choral City's death throes came in tremendous waves, battering against the Precentor's Palace like a tsunami. In the streets below and throughout the palace, the people of the Choral City were decaying where they stood, bodies coming apart in torrents of disintegrating flesh.

  The people thronged in the streets to die, keening their hatred and fear up at the sky, imploring their gods to deliver them. Millions of people screamed at once and the result was a terrible black-stained gale of death. A Warsinger soared overhead, trying to ease the agony and terror of their deaths with her songs, but the virus found her too, and instead of singing the praises of Isstvan's gods she coughed out black plumes as the virus tore through her

  insides. She fell like a shot bird, twirling towards the dying below.

  A bulky shape appeared on the roof of the PreВ­centor's Palace. Ancient Rylanor strode to the edge of the roof, overlooking the scenes of horror below, the viral carnage seething between the buildings. Rylanor's dreadnought body was sealed against the world outside, sealed far more effectively than any Astartes armour, and the deathly wind swirled harmlessly around him as he watched the city's death unfold.

  Rylanor looked up towards the sky, where far above, the Warmaster's fleet was still emptying the last of its deathly payload onto Isstvan III. The ancient dreadnought stood alone, the only note of peace in the screaming horror of the Choral City's death.

  'Good job we built these bunkers tough,' said CapВ­tain Ehrlen.

  The darkness of the sealed bunker was only compounded by the sounds of death from beyond its thick walls. Pitifully few of the World Eaters had made it into the network of bunkers that fringed the edge of the trench network and barricaded themselves inside. They waited in the dark, listening to the virus killing off the city's population more efficiently than even their chainaxes could.

  Tarvitz waited amongst them, listening to the deaths of millions of people in mute horror. The

  World Eaters appeared to be unmoved, the deaths of civilians meaning nothing to them.

  The screaming was dying down, replaced by a dull moaning. Pain and fear mingled in a distant roar of slow death.

  'How much longer must we hide like rats in the dark?' demanded Ehrlen.

  The virus will burn itself out quickly,' said Tarvitz. That's what it's designed to do: eat away anything living and leave a battlefield for the enemy to take.' 'How do you know?' asked Ehrlen. Tarvitz looked at him. He could tell Ehrlen the truth, and he knew that he deserved it, but what good would it do? The World Eaters might kill him for even saying it. After all, their own primarch was part of the Warmaster's conspiracy.

  'I have seen such weapons employed before,’ said Tarvitz.

  You had better be right,’ snarled Ehrlen, soundВ­ing far from satisfied with Tarvitz's answer. 'I won't cower here for much longer!'

  The World Eater looked over his warriors, their bloodstained armoured bodies packed close together in the darkness of the bunker. He raised his axe and called, Wrathe! Have you raised the Sons of Horus?'

  'Not yet,’ replied Wrathe. Tarvitz could see he was a veteran, with numerous cortical implants blisВ­tered across his scalp. There's chatter, but nothing direct,’

  'So they're still alive?'

  'Maybe,’

  Ehrlen shook his head. They got us. We thought we'd taken this city and they got us.'

  'None of us could have known,’ said Tarvitz.

  'No. There are no excuses,’ Ehrlen's face hardened. 'The World Eaters must always go further than the enemy. Wheivthey attack, we charge right back at them. When they dig in, we dig them out. When they kill our warriors, we kill their cities, but this time, the enemy went further than we did. We attacked their city, and they destroyed it to take us with them,’

  "We were all caught out, captain,’ said Tarvitz. The Emperor's Children, too,’

  'No, Tarvitz, this was our fight. The Emperor's Children and the Sons of Horus were to behead the beast, but we were sent to cut its heart out. This was an enemy that could not be scared away or thrown into confusion. The Isstvanians had to be killed. Whether the other Legions acknowledge it or not, the World Eaters were the ones who had to win this city, and we take responsibility for our failures,’ 'It's not your responsibility,’ said Tarvitz. 'A lesser soldier pretends that his failures are those of his commanders,’ said Ehrlen. 'An Astartes realises they are his alone,’ 'No, captain, said Tarvitz. You don't understand. I

  mean-' 'Got something,’ said Wrathe from the corner of

  the bunker. The Sons of Horus?' asked Ehrlen.

  Wrathe shook his head. 'Death Guard. They took cover in the bunkers further west,’

  'What do they say?'

  That the virus is dying down,’

  Then we could be out there again soon,’ said Ehrlen with relish. 'If the Isstvanians come to take their city back, they'll find us waiting for them,’

  'No,’ said Tarvitz. There's one more stage of the viral attack still to come,’

  What's that?' demanded Ehrlen.

  The firestorm,’ said Tarvitz.

  'You see now,' said Horus to the assembled remembrancers. This is war. This is cruelty and death. This is what we do for you and yet you turn your face from it,’

  Weeping men and women clung to one another in the wake of such monstrous genocide, unable to comprehend the scale of the slaughter that had just been enacted in the name of the Imperium.

  You have come to my ship to chronicle the Great Cmsade and there is much to be said for what you have achieved, but things change and times move on,’ continued Horus as the Astartes warriors along the flanks of the chamber closed the doors and stood before them with their bolters held across their chests.

  The Great Crusade is over,’ said Horus, his voice booming with power and strength. The ideals it once stood for are dead and all we have fought for has been a lie. Until now. Now I will bring the

  Crusade back to its rightful path and rescue the galaxy from its abandonment at the hands of the Emperor.'

  Astonished gasps and wails spread around the chamber at Horus's words and he relished the freeВ­dom he felt in saying them out loud. The need for secrecy and misdirection was no more. Now he could unveil the grande
ur of his designs for the galaxy and cast aside his false facade to reveal his true purpose.

  'You cry out, but mere mortals cannot hope to comprehend the scale of my plans,’ said Horus, savouring the looks of panic that began to spread around the audience chamber.

  No iterator could ever have had a crowd so comВ­pletely in the palm of his hand.

  'Unfortunately, this means that there is no place for the likes of you in this new crusade. I am to embark on the greatest war ever unleashed on the galaxy, and I cannot be swayed from my course by those who harbour disloyalty.' Horus smiled.

  The smile of an angelic executioner. 'Kill them,’ he said. 'All of them,’ • Bolter fire stabbed into the crowd at the Warmas-ter's order. Flesh burst in wet explosions and a hundred bodies fell in the first fusillade. The screaming began as the crowd surged away from the Astartes who marched into their midst. But there was no escape. Guns blazed and roaring chainswords rose and fell.

  The slaughter took less than a minute and Horus turned away from the killing to watch the final death throes of Isstvan III. Abaddon emerged from the shadows where he and Maloghurst had watched the slaughter of the remembrancers.

  'My lord,’ said Abaddon, bowing low.

  'What is it, my son?'

  'Ship surveyors report that the virus has mostly burned out,’

  And the gaseous levels?'

  'Off the scale, my lord,’ smiled Abaddon. The gunners await your orders,’

  Horus watched the swirling, noxious clouds enveloping the planet below.

  All it would take was a single spark.

  He imagined the planet as the frayed end of a fuse, a fuse that would ignite the galaxy in a searing conflagration and would lead to an inexorable conВ­clusion on Terra.

  'Order the guns to fire,’ said Horus, his voice cold. 'Let the galaxy burn!'

  'Emperor preserve us,' whispered Moderati Cassar, unable to hide his horror and not caring who heard him. The miasma of rancid, putrid gasses still hung thickly around the Titan and he could only dimly see the trenches again, along with the Death Guard emerging from the bunkers. Shortly after the order to seal the Titan had been given, the Death Guard had taken cover, clearly in receipt of the same order as the Dies Irae.

  The Isstvanians had received no such order. The Death Guard's withdrawal had drawn the Isstvan-ian soldiers forwards and they had borne the full brunt of the bio-weapon.

  Masses of mucus-like flesh choked the trenches, half-formed human corpses looming from them, faces melted and rot-bloated bodies split open. Thousands upon thousands of Isstvanians lay in rotting heaps and thick streams of sluggish black corruption ran the length of the trenches.

  Beyond the battlefield, death had consumed the forests that lay just outside the Choral City's limits, now resembling endless graveyards of blackened trunks, like scorched skeletal hands. The earth beneath was saturated with biological death and the air was thick with foul gasses released by the oceans of decaying matter.

  'Report,’ said Princeps Turnet, re-entering the cockpit from the Titan's main dorsal cavity.

  'We're sealed,’ said Moderati Aruken on the other side of the bridge. 'The crew's fine and I have a zero reading of contaminants,’

  'The virus has burned itself out,’ said Turnet. 'Cas-sar, what's out there?'

  Cassar took a moment to gather his thoughts, still struggling with the hideous magnitude of death that he couldn't have even imagined had he not seen it through the eyes of the Dies Irae.

  'The Isstvanians are… gone,’ he said. He peered through the swirling clouds of gas at the mass of the city to one side of the Titan. 'All of them,’

  The Death Guard?'

  Cassar looked closer, seeing segments of gun-metal armour partially buried in gory chokepoints, marking where Astartes had fallen.

  'Some of them were caught out there,’ he said. 'A lot of them are dead, but the order must have got to most of them in time,’

  The order?'

  Yes, princeps. The order to take cover,’

  Turnet peered through the Titan's eye on Aruken's side of the bridge, seeing Death Guard warriors through the greenish haze securing the trenches around their bunkers and treading through the foul remains of the Isstvanians.

  'Damn,’ said Turnet.

  We are blessed,’ said Cassar. They could so easily have been-'

  Watch your mouth, Moderati! That religious filth is a crime by the order of-'

  Tumet's voice cut off as movement caught his eyes.

  Cassar followed his gaze in time to see the clouds of gas lit up by a brilliant beam of light as a blazing lance strike slashed through the clouds of noxious, highly flammable gasses.

  All it took was a single spark.

  An entire planet's worth of decaying matter wreathed the atmosphere of Isstvan III in a thick shawl of combustible gasses. The lance strike from the Vengeful Spirit burned through the upper

  atmosphere into the choking miasma and its searing beam ignited the gas with a dull whoosh that seemed to suck the oxygen from the air.

  In a second, the air itself caught light, ripping across the landscape in a howling maelstrom of fire and noise. Entire continents were laid bare, their landscapes seared to bare rock, their decayed popuВ­lations vaporised in seconds as winds of fire swept across their surfaces in a deadly gale of blazing destruction.

  Cities exploded as gas lines went up, blazing towers of fire whipping madly in the deadly firestorm. NothВ­ing could survive and flesh, stone and metal were vitrified or melted in the unimaginable temperatures. Entire sprawls of buildings collapsed, the bodies of their former occupants reduced to ashen waste on the wind, palaces of marble and industrial heartlands destroyed in gigantic mushroom clouds as the storm of destruction swept around Isstvan III with relentless, mindless destruction until it seemed as though the entire globe was ablaze.

  Those Astartes who had survived the viral attack found themselves consumed in flames as they desВ­perately sought to find cover once more.

  But against this firestorm there could be no cover for those who had dared to brave the elements.

  By the time the echoes of the recoil had faded on the Warmaster's flagship, billions had died on IsstВ­van III.

  * Р¤ *

  Moderati Cassar hung on for dear life as the temВ­pestuous firestorm raged around the Dies Irae. The colossal Titan swayed like a reed in the wind, and he just hoped that the new stabilising gyros the Mechanicum had installed held firm in the face of the onslaught.

  Across from him, Aruken gripped the rails surВ­rounding his chair with white knuckled hands, staring in awed terror at the blazing vortices spinВ­ning beyond the command bridge.

  'Emperor save us. Emperor save us. Emperor save us,’ he whispered over and over as the flames bilВ­lowed and surged for what seemed like an eternity. The heat in the command bridge was intolerable since the coolant units had been shut down when the Titan was sealed off from the outside world.

  Like a gigantic pressure cooker, the temperature inside the Titan climbed rapidly until Cassar felt as if he could no longer draw breath without searing the interior of his lungs. He closed his eyes and saw the ghostly green scroll of data flash through his retinas. Sweat poured from him in a torrent and he knew that this was it, this was how he would die: not in battle, not saying the Lectitio Divinitatus, but cooked to death inside his beloved Dies Irae.

  He had lost track of how long they had been bathed in fire when the professional core of his mind saw that the temperature readings, which had been rising rapidly since the firestorm had hit, were beginning to flatten out. Cassar opened his eyes and saw the madly churning mass of flame through

  the viewing bays of the Titan's head, but РџРµ also saw spots of sky, burned blue as the fire incinerated the last of the combustible gasses released by the dead of Isstvan.

  'Temperature dropping,’ he said, amazed that they were still ali
ve.

  Aruken laughed as he too realised they were going to live.

  Princeps Turnet slid back into his command chair and began bringing the Titan's systems back on line. Cassar slid back into his own chair, the leather soaking wet where his sweat had collected. He saw the readouts of the external surveyors come to life as the princeps once again opened their systems to the outside world. 'Systems check,’ ordered Turnet. Aruken nodded, mopping his sweat-streaked brow with his sleeve. "Weapons fine, though we'll need to watch our rate of fire, since they're already pretty hot,’

  'Confirmed,’ said Cassar. We won't be able to fire the plasma weapons any time soon either. We'll probably blow our arm off if we try,’

  'Understood,’ said Turnet. 'Initiate emergency coolant procedures. I want those guns ready to fire as soon as possible,’

  Cassar nodded, though he was unsure as to the cause of the princeps's urgency. Surely there could be nothing out there that would have surВ­vived the firestorm? Certainly nothing that could threaten a Titan.

  'Incoming!' called Aruken, and Cassar looked up to see a flock of black specks descending rapidly through the crystal sky, flying low towards the blackened ruins of the burned city.

  'Aruken, track them,’ snapped Turnet.

  'Gunships,’ said Aruken. They're heading for the centre of the city, what's left of the palace,’

  'Whose are they?'

  'Can't tell yet,’

  Cassar sat back in the cockpit seat and let the filaments of the Titan's command systems come to the fore of his mind once again. He engaged the Titan's targeting systems and his vision plunged into the target reticule, zooming in on the formation of gunships disappearing among the crumbling, fire-blackened ruins of the Choral City. He saw bone-white colours trimmed with blue and the symbol of fanged jaws closing over a planet.

  'World Eaters,’ he said out loud. They're the World Eaters. It must be the second wave,’

  There is no second wave,’ said Turnet, as if to himself. Aruken, get the vox-mast up and connect me to the Vengeful Spirit.' 'Fleet command?' asked Aruken. 'No,’ said Turnet, 'the Warmaster,’