'This area is clear,' the Lion informed them.
Leaving his brothers to hold the doorway, Herodael moved to the Lion's side. His armour emitted a terrific growl as he took the knee, several tonnes of advanced war-plate supported, for a moment at least, by the power of a single servo-motorised joint. He bowed his head.
'Forgive me, Sire, for not coming to your aid sooner.'
'If forgiveness were mine to freely give then it would be worthless. Your aid was not required, but if your honour compels you to seek forgiveness then you may earn it.'
In a shudder of powered plate, the Companion rose.
'The Muspellian regiments rise up,' said the Lion.
Herodael removed his helmet. 'As do our own, Sire. Battalion-strength forces of human Army auxilia have moved against several hub gates and checkpoints. I've had reports of local armour being deployed against the Nigris bridge-forts and of infighting amongst the fort's defenders.'
'They have been repulsed?'
'They have. Sire. Knights of the First hold every strongpoint and critical infrastructure on the Vaniskray.'
'We have lured the beast's first attack and bloodied it. Good.'
'Our position is less secure elsewhere, Sire. There are reports of ongoing fighting throughout the rest of the Sheitansvar.'
'This is only the beginning, Herodael. Our foe has yet to commit his full strength.'
'There are two thousand knights still on the island. If we sally from the Vaniskray, we can-'
'Duriel will order them to fall back. His orders are to hold the Vaniskray. That is what I expect him to do.'
'But, Sire-'
The Lion raised a hand to silence him.
He had always been guarded with his humours. 'Those few who knew him took it as a surfeit of phlegm, mistakenly believing his character to take after that of his brother, Dorn. But that was to mistake circumspection for obduracy, aloofness for indifference, and Lion El'Jonson displayed neither. He demanded much and gave but little, yet in his hearts he loved all of his sons as both a lord and a father. His pride in their deeds was surpassed only by the demand he placed on those deeds being exceeded. He had overseen the extermination of countless billions. Such was his duty, his special place within the pantheon of warlike avatars who served their father's ambitions, and though he took no joy from it, nor did he question its justice. His brothers thought him unquestioningly ruthless and they were right. They believed that he would expend any resource, even the lives of his own sons, to prosecute the Imperium's wars, and they were right. They said that he had not shed a single tear at such losses, not even after the annihilation of the Kangda had seen his Legion's strength struck in half, and again they were right.
They thought these things a criticism of him.
When Duriel ordered the withdrawal, many of the Lion's sons would die. This, he knew.
"I have my duties to honour, my son. As they have theirs.'
'Yes, Sire.'
Searching inside the hidden pockets of his cloak, the Lion withdrew a medium-range palm-vox and thumb-activated the transmission switch.
'Stenius, report.' The palm-vox buzzed with static, punctuated by the occasional grizzle of audio distortion. 'Invincible Reason, come in.' The palm-vox clicked as the Lion switched frequencies, the channel reverting to a scanning hiss. 'Night Lance, come in. Blade of Numarc, respond.'
'A moment, Sire.' Herodael replaced his helmet. Reversed runes flashed across his lens displays as he ran his vox-systems through a series of brief diagnostic transmissions. 'I am receiving no response from any of our off-planet forces. How is that possible?'
'The fleet has been compromised.' The Lion frowned. 'The beast is more pernicious than I allowed for.'
Herodael fell silent, no longer questioning, a knight awaiting the instruction of his liege.
'You, Duriel and Holguin will hold the Vaniskray in my absence. I must return to the Invincible Reason and reassert my command of the fleet.'
'Yes, Sire. But how? Teleportation is out and without vox contact there is no way to have a gunship dispatched from the fleet to collect you.'
'The most recent round of deployments will have left a handful here on the planet.’
Manipulating the palm-vox one-handed, the Lion switched to a coded frequency, transmitting a single word to all appropriately keyed receivers in its range - Santales.
'I will summon one to the Vaniskray.'
'A moment, Sire.' Herodael raised a hand as he listened in on the action reports that flooded through his battleplate sensorium. 'Intense resistance reported on the Vaniskray roof. Squads falling back. Most likely it is another one of...' he turned to look at the carbonised shadow left against the wall by Manev, '...of those. There is no space on the esplanade to set down a Thunderhawk or a Storm bird. If you are to be extracted then it will have to be from there.'
'Very well.'
The Lion turned towards the staircase that, in addition to the gatehouse choke point, this strongpoint had been constructed to hold. It led up to the topmost tier of battlements and the Vaniskray's anti-air batteries. He strode through, emerging on a wide shelf, pan of an outer staircase that ran from the mid-level fortifications to the summit emplacements.
A hundred and ten metres below him, night-black waves beat against the rugged rock armour and wooden pilings of the esplanade. Periodic explosions of icy spray swept the road as far as the cliff, reducing the blown-out wrecks of civilian vehicles to the occasional flicker of flame. Staccato firefights illuminated the island keep, but, as Herodael had asserted to him, the Dark Angels held the rock of Uncus in a firm grip.
The view of Nigris, Merigion, Lament, Coccyges and beyond was one of complete chaos. Spot lamps, high-powered beams tattered by rain, swung wildly through the dark. Tocsins wailed. Fortalices screamed with the voices of those trapped inside. Lasweapons and autocarbines chattered, echoing and shrill, more akin to a riot in a penal compound than a night battle. The Lion watched from his point of vantage as the casemates mounted on the Nigris bridge tore each other apart, laser destroyer arrays and quad heavy bolters ripping out in seconds what it had taken the First Legion's auxilia weeks to install.
A gale-force blast of ocean wind pushed against him as he looked up, a world testing its strength against his and finding itself wanting. Bolters barked against the violence. Helm-augmented voices shouted. In opposition, something mighty shuddered the walls of the keep with its footsteps.
'Companions of the Lion,' Herodael roared, reactivating his power fist as he emerged onto the abutment beside him. 'To your duty!'
II
Wiping blood from the fascia plate, Redloss placed his gauntleted palm to the scanner.
A watery green light dappled his war-plate as scanning lasers squirmed beneath his fingers. The embedded electronics trilled with sequential confirmations as they read the hexagrammic runes on the gauntlet ceramite. The fascia slid back to reveal an ivory keypad, which was then shunted forward. Aravain watched, unspeaking, as Redloss punched in a cryptex sequence that would be re-randomised hourly. There was a series of increasingly reverberative clunks as bolts were disengaged, followed by pops, fizzles and sub-audial whines as stasis fields, kill-haloes and repulsor locks powered down.
The door slid open.
Cryonic vapours crawled through the open hatch like a primordial ooze aroused from torpor. It flowed turgidly over the legionaries' boots. Aravain's nose wrinkled at the acrid blend of odours, a cocktail of mechanical and cyborganic preservatives.
Redloss turned to him.
'This is the Dreadwing sacristy. Walk nowhere that I do not walk first.'
Aravain nodded.
Kicking through the clinging vapours, Redloss entered. Barely able to master the nervous energy he felt at standing before that forbidden threshold, Aravain followed.
On a ship better known for its unasked questions, the Dreadwing sacristy was renowned as a repository for the deadliest arcana to have survived Old Earth's Age of Strife unused
. Within its multiply secured and ident-locked vaults could be found man-portable atomics, gene-targeted bio-weaponry, unstable plasma devices, singularity drivers, psionic phages - weapons that were so powerful, so cataclysmic in their intent, that the Emperor had deemed them too dangerous for the bulk of His forces to be allowed even to know of their existence. To His First legion alone had He entrusted the secrets of such relic weaponry. With the arsenal that He had entrusted to their keeping, the Dark Angels had at their disposal the firepower to usher in a new Old Night should they, or He, so deSire it.
Who else but the First could have been entrusted with such a responsibility? Who else but the First could be relied upon to inflict that most final of sanctions if so commanded?
The Wolf King boasted to all that he was his father's executioner. He was a deterrent, a hound to snarl from behind a sealed gate, never to be unleashed. What the Lion was to his father did not speak its name so brazenly. For where Russ was a warning, the Lion was a solution. The final solution. He was the Emperor’s exterminator. What the honour of Russ would not abide he would sanction without hesitation. The enemy who might yet be integrated, the adversary whose misguided but noble resistance might be canonised in posterity, these were wars for his brothers to wage. When the First Legion turned their guns upon a foe it was to annihilate without trace, to obliterate beyond all hope of record.
That was the purpose for which the Dark Angels were created and it was the reason that He made them first.
Even the Mechanicum did not know what terrible secrets had been locked away by the Dreadwing in chambers such as these. If the machine-priests of Mars should ever seek to turn against the Emperor's goals of galactic unity, then it would be the weapons of the Dark Angels that would bring them low.
'This way, brother,' said Redloss, declining to whisper as Aravain felt the weight and sanctity of the space demanded, his deep voice echoing through the darkened vault.
Refraining from speaking in kind, Aravain followed in silence.
Thick, adamantium-ribbed columns buttressed the sacristy chamber at regular intervals, braced and girded as if to survive an Exterminatus-level event. This chamber would withstand the destruction of the Invincible Reason herself. Ropes of cabling snaked across the deck plates, concealed under coolant mists to feed the energy demands of stasis chambers, energy fields and magnetic locks. The Emperor's appointed guardians were determined to safeguard his secrets, even from those who had been entrusted to venture this far. It was circles within circles, secrets within secrets, an endless spiral that a functional immortal could walk his whole life and never see the end of.
'Are you a member of the Order of Santales, brother?' said Aravain.
Redloss was silent a moment, walking deeper into the sacristy. 'No. Suffice to say that you cannot store a secret arsenal aboard this ship without the complicity of the Dreadwing.'
Aravain wondered, not for the first lime, at the tangled web of intrigue that served the First Legion in lieu of a true hierarchy. It was labyrinthine, as inscrutable at times to insiders as it was to outsiders, but it served them, and its byzantine structures were as much a deliberate act of obfuscation as they were a side effect of its feudal origins. As he considered this, his path followed Redloss' across a baroque and heavily warded adamantium tomb, akin to a Dreadnought's armoured sarcophagus, only considerably larger and more secure. In addition to the three discrete energy barriers that Aravain could see, binharic runes and warding sigils in all six letter forms of the hexagrammaton, it was bound in heavy duty chains and padlocked. As if sensing his regard, the containment pod emitted a binharised shriek of pure, mindlocked insanity, the tomb's heavy doors forcing against the outer padlock. The fear response had been carved from Aravain's psyche as a neophyte, but his reaction to that shriek went straight for the butchered endings that the legion's chirurgeons had left in its place.
In the grim lettering of the Dreadwing and the Ironwing, Aravain read the warning script.
'What is in here?'
'I don't know,' said Redloss.
'You are master of the Dreadwing. How can you not know?’
'There are secrets in this sarcophagus that are beyond even me. This tomb demands both a forge-wright of the Ironwing and an officer of the Dreadwing to unseal. I have no idea what is inside. Come.'
Redloss turned aside from the tomb, stalking through the cryo-vapours until he came to a huge adamantium vault. The doors were as ornate as any gateway to a prehistoric city of the dead. The metal had been carved with santales vines, the rendered creepers climbing over and over one another in an endless, chaotic spiral. It shimmered with condensation, despite the deep cold, as though whatever was interred within emitted its own almost undetectable heat. The Dreadbringer presented a thick iron key and inserted it in a concealed lock. Aravain felt an unpleasant itching at the back of his mind, a static tingle that was as distinct from the probing of a warm, living psyker as the touch of a servitor was from that of a human being. The authorisations systems were backed up by some manner of psi-arcana. The Emperor had proscribed the use of such dread technologies, well before the advent of the Great Crusade.
It scanned him. Aravain fought down the impulse to resist.
The vault emitted a flat, atonal chime, apparently satisfied in what its probes had gleaned of his licence and intention. The door hinged silently open, and for once Redloss himself gave in to proper reverence: the awe that even the avowed agnostic can feel in the presence of such breathtaking weaponry, the closeness that only instruments of mass destruction can bring a warrior to a god.
'The armourium of the Order of Santales.'
Redloss stepped aside.
The Codicier raised his hand to hover over the imprisoned weaponry. Not since the darkest hours of Old Night had mankind's mastery of the killing sciences been explored in such intimate minutiae There was no consistency of design or uniformity of function. Nothing in this vault had ever been, or would ever be, immortalised in the sequences of a Standard Template Construct. Every grip, sleeve and neural shunt that his fingers brushed belonged to an artefact that was unique in this galaxy. Each was a singular terror, born from the infinite creativity of humanity's apogee and never to be repeated since. Neural whips, lonophoric eradicators. Personality phages. Gemynd blasters. Glass-walled grenades that carried torpid, warp-borne mindworms inside. These were weapons that attacked the mind and, whether one believed in such notions or not, the soul. Built at the pinnacle of mankind's supremacy over the laws of physics, many had been constructed to eradicate not only their victim's physical body but its reflection in the empyrean as well, weapons of such unholy potency that not even the memory of the slain could remain intact.
The relic Aravain finally settled upon was a monstrous ancestor of the bolter family, massive-barrelled, fed by a multitude of plastek hoses that Redloss silently proceeded to clamp into Aravain's armour's power plant. Superficially it resembled a heavy bolter, albeit heavier, built to be wielded by Men of Iron or some other breed of upgraded soldier in the millennia before mankind had raised its transhuman Legions. The stamp it bore was recognisably Terran, though of no lore that still existed today. It was only as Redloss clamped an ammunition hopper to Aravain's girdle plate and started manually feeding the belt to the magazine that its more fundamental differences became apparent. The high-calibre shells emitted a glow that burned Aravain's psychic sight, even as he closed his eyes and turned his face away.
'Yes,' Aravain said, feeding his gauntlet reverently through the grip loop on the cannon's upper barrel and feeling its weight. His harness suspensors whirred as they spread the immense load across his power-armoured frame. 'This will put the fear of the First into them.'
'Good hunting, brother,' said Redloss.
'You will not be accompanying me?'
'I must wait here for the rest of your order. When the Lion calls on me again, I will join you in this battle.'
Aravain raised the muzzle of his heavy weapon in salute. 'For the
Lion and Caliban.'
Redloss nodded in kind.
'Do your duty, brother.'
III
From prow to stern, a plague of insanity swept the Invincible Reason. Crewmen ripped up workstation chairs, tearing their own muscles in the process of breaking them from the deck plates, before using them to brutalise their stations. Others ran screaming through the passages as though on fire. Armsmen turned on phantasmal tormentors, unloading entire clips of autoguns and draining the charge cells of lascarbines into whatever it was that their nightmares perceived. But where Savine Grael and a handful like her walked, madness coalesced like accreting stardust into the hard core of something focused and baleful. Officers in blood-drenched fatigues ceased their mindless butchery and fell in behind her Deckhands and serfs abandoned their petty acts of vandalism. Army personnel and Legion armsmen were drawn inexorably towards the gravitic pull of her psychic power.
And so while the legion, and those few humans sufficiently strong of will to resist, were engaged suppressing a thousand insignificant acts of anarchy and mayhem, half a dozen small but growing forces converged, as if by conscious command, on critical sections of the ship.
Through the tendrilous organo-psychic neural architecture that bound the khrave into a unitary consciousness, half in and half out of the warp, Savine was simultaneously aware of the same occurring on every other vessel of the Dark Angels fleet. And on Harvest itself.
The arrival of the Legion had been unexpected, had forced them to gather their minds in conclave, but this would work out to their benefit, this was an opportunity. The Imperium was sprawling and careless, as so many stellar empires before them had been on their anarchic journey towards the pinnacle of their powers. And where there was chaos, where there was distance and confusion, there would be food for the khrave. The addition of the Invincible Reason and her fleet would allow them to project their will over countless more worlds.
Lion El'Jonson- Lord of the First - David Guymer Page 9
