The khrave immediately on top of him pushed down with the full might of its mind and Duriel screamed. In defiance of all probability and precedent, the strength of the First Legion began to break.
II
'The khrave are committed,' said Aravain, eyes half closed, his mortal senses cocooned by the restive howl of the Storm Eagle's engines. Dark Steed coasted at an altitude of four hundred kilometres, well above the operational envelope of the khrave's interceptor swarms.
'Are you certain?' said Trigaine. 'There has been no confirmation from the planet.'
In addition to the preceptor and Aravain, nineteen Santales Knights of the inner circle swayed in their drop harnesses, armoured, armed and adorned in the heraldries and paraphernalia of the First. There were none of the jokes, rivalry and personal challenges that debased such brotherhoods of other Legions. Here, each knight hung in his creaking restraint throne, each a man unto his own, meditating on his own duty in the battle to come. While the preceptor's head was hooded again as custom demanded, his armour had been decorated with the oath papers of his warriors, affixed with moss-green wax and inscribed with golden inks.
Hanging from his own cable restraints, Aravain turned his head towards him. His replacement helmet concealed bloodshot eyes and masked from his brothers the taste of acid bile on his longue. I le did not know if their minds could feel the psychic weight of the true-khrave as he could, but Trigaine's words led him to doubt it.
'Trust me, preceptor. I am sure.'
A montent later, Trigaine's helmet-vox burred. The garbled battle cries of their brothers filtered through the cabin from the preceptor's unsecured vox.
The old warrior looked grim.
'I will not question your intuition again, brother.'
'I sense it will be called upon before we are triumphant here.'
The preceptor opened a new vox-link Trigaine to all units. 'Prepare to descend.'
III
'Adjust bearing - 218-112-225. Maintain nominal thrust.'
The Lion passed the encrypted data-slate to the helmswoman. She was a slight woman, fair-haired, her dark green uniform ringed with sweat patches, speckled with bloody crimson over one sleeve. She threw a weary salute before hurrying back to her post, shepherded every step of the way by a fully armoured legionary, the green glow of darkvision and targeting screed rinsing his lenses of any modicum of empathy.
By the lion's decree the deck was in darkness, ihe warp shutters had been closed over the viewing panes, scaling the deck in adamantium and denying even the light of the stars. All but a handful of vital terminals had been shut down. Puddles of watery green illumination emanated from workstations in which the same mortal officers had been penned for hours.
By the Lion's second decree, all crew deemed non-essential had been locked into their quarters or, if that had proven impractical, rounded up into mess halls, storage bays, auditoria and any other space large enough to hold a few thousand baseline humans for an as yet unspecified length of time. Vox had been deactivated, except on the Lion's own voice command. Every internal door that could be remotely sealed had been, legionaries of the Firewing prowled every corridor, armed with pulse-stun weaponry and orders to subdue on sight anyone who was not Lion El'Jonson.
That the primarch worked to some stratagem he would not share was lost on no one. The Legion was intolerant of curiosity, but suspicion was healthy, and quietly encouraged at all levels.
The Lion had ordered over a hundred minor course corrections since authorising their initial escape vector, the Invincible Reason sailing in circles for the better part of three hours.
The reasons for this the primarch divulged to no one. The facts of this he deliberately withheld from the five auspectoriae plinths who, oblivious to one another, carried out their work in parallel.
Stenius approached the dais bearing a stack of slates. He handed them face down to the Lion and then snapped to attention without a word. The Lion turned them over and unsealed them, taking a second to absorb them fully.
'Aegis,' the Lion said, his words seeking out every darkened corner without need for a raised voice, and another mortal officer and his transhuman shadow began the long walk to the primarch’s dais. The primarch turned to Stenius. 'Is all prepared?'
'Yes, lord. Though my knowledge of the Theologitek's secrets is but a fraction of Master Duriel's.'
'The Ironbringer's duties demand his presence elsewhere. I expect you will rise to this challenge.'
Stenius pursed his lips, and nodded. The warriors of the old Terran Legion were reticent, as much as, and in some cases even more than, their Calibanite brothers. It suggested something in their genetic makeup, rather than their planetary heritage, that made them thus. That this had always been the Emperor's design.
'Yes, Sire.'
’Report to launch bay five,' said the Lion. 'You will know what to do when you get there.'
The Terran nodded, then turned on his heel and marched down the gangway without another word.
The aegis officer arrived just as Stenius left.
'Unlock doors epsilon-1235798, gamma-7432191, and tau-001252 through to -59,' the Lion said.
The officer saluted and withdrew, the Lion satisfied that no mind beyond his own could hope to memorise every one of a Gloriana's several thousand portal idents. As far as the officer, or any xenos sentience with access to the mortal's thoughts could know, the Lion was opening and closing doors at random.
'Lion to Holguin,’ he said, activating his personal short-range vox.
‘Holguin, in position.'
'The Companions are assembled?'
'Yes, Sire.'
'Have them muster in the starboard teleportarium.'
‘Yes, Sire.'
The Lion pushed his hands down into the arms of his throne and rose.
'I will be joining you presently.’
* * *
IV
Most knights keenly anticipated combat drops.
The adrenaline. The noise. The bone-shaking force of a terminal-velocity descent coupled with the ferocious Gs of evasive manoeuvres. It was as close a feeling to pure terror as a warrior engineered to be without fear could know. Others secretly loathed them for, Aravain suspected, the same reasons: the feelings of mortal helplessness they evoked. Aravain had no love for the experience, but he, and he alone amongst his brethren, was far from helpless.
With eyes glazed, he extended his mind's senses through Dark Steed's armour and into the screaming, cinder-lit atmosphere of Muspel.
It was like plunging head first into an electrical storm, but this was a hurricane not of fire and metal, but of the strands of fate. A missile looped towards him, sending forth ripples from its point of predestination. Aravain bent his mind towards it, as if to pluck a leaf from the wind. The Storm Eagle banked hard, slamming Aravain's semi-conscious body sideways in its harness. The future fled his grasp. The missile whistled across the gunship's bow and detonated in a clump of freefalling debris.
Aravain grunted. Blood trickled from his nose. He dabbed it with one finger and looked down at the red spots on the black metal. No scrying of the future was without flaw. It was contingent by its nature, and in a system as disordered as an aerial battle any one of a billion flecks of dust could shatter a man's preconceptions and fling him down a doomed path. Aravain concentrated. His perceptions were blunted somehow. The future seemed far away.
This was the khrave's work.
He looked down at the pistol in his lap. The glow of the charge cells was a black spot over his mind.
He closed his eyes and focused, his mind's eye seeing the rattling slubber fire that winged one of their escorts, a massively over-armed Fire Raptor gunship that resembled a mastiff with stub-metal wings.
He made to vox a warning, but it was the near-past he was seeing now, not the future, He watched, a spectator, as the bullet hose chewed through paint and armour. The rugged gunship wobbled but held steady as the Fury interceptor overshot. Aravain exulted as
the Fire Raptor shredded the aircraft's engine nacelles with a thunderous shriek of Avenger boltcannon fire.
Unable to manipulate this battle any further, he drew his senses back into the present, returning them sluggishly to scent and sound and touch: incense, afterburners and muscle-tight restraint cords.
His head was an overworked aching lump, his chest prickling with sharp points of acidic pain. The back of his neck, where skin made contact with the crystal lattice of his psychic hood, was, in agonising contrast, almost black with cold.
The powers of the Librarius were many and potent, but not without a cost that was far in excess of any comparable exertions of the body.
'We are coming in over the Nigris Bridge,' Trigaine shouted from the harness nearest to the rear hatch. 'Dropping payload!'
Aravain allowed his awareness to float, watching without the anchor of a physical presence in the moment as Dark Steed and her sisters' payload of rad-bombs and virion destroyers fell. A century ago, the Lion's voice had joined the chorus of his brother primarchs in condemning the use of such weapons, and had supported the Emperor in their sanction. Now, the Dark Angels dropped them on an Imperial city with abandon, and Aravain could only watch as His wayward subjects felt such retribution as mankind had not inflicted upon itself in a millennia of war.
'For the Lion, and for Caliban,' he muttered, centring his personality on the repetitious phrases. 'Loyalty and honour. Courage without doubt.'
'Clearing the walls!’ roared Trigaine.
The pulse-pound report of Dark Steed's retrofitted beam weaponry rang through the Storm Eagle's fuselage. Staring blankly forward, Aravain threw his senses outwards. The feat was even more difficult to achieve than he had found it before, like trying to squeeze one's face through the bars of a cage. I le persisted, if for no other reason than to assure himself that it could still be done. His empyreal eye manifested over Dark Steed's nose, taking in the spindle-limbed psychic blind spot of a khrave form and the Ironwing forge-wright it was hunched over, seconds before the former was eviscerated by psy-beams. Trained to heed the thoughts of his brothers, his mind touched on Duriel's, his psyche flooding with feelings of bitterness and shame before Dark Steed could sweep him over the battlements.
'Brace for planet fall!' said Trigaine. 'In four... three... two...’
The Storm Eagle touched down with the artistry of an asteroid, and its efficiency, the impact hurling the Knights of Santales against their harness restraints.
'For the Lion!' bellowed Trigaine as the rear hatch blew out. The knights unbuckled, piling down the ramp and into war.
And this was war: visceral, immediate, and bloody.
Aircraft and pieces of fighting machines peppered the esplanade. Lakes of spilt promethium burned, turning the road into a gauntlet of roaring flames, periodically doused by wave uprush before re-igniting. Mortar shells thumped from the castcllaiions of the Vaniskray keep, hundreds every minute, to burst amidst the islet's redans and outbuildings, even as a scrum of Triaros and Dracosan armoured carriers forced its way through the breach in the bridge-fort gate.
The Dark Angels fell back from the wall in stages, using the flames and debris as cover. A Contemptor Dreadnought whose frayed back-banner and personalised heraldry identified him as Telamane Axtyr, Champion of Dorsis Trinary and Right Hand of Thrane, held the breach alongside a cadre of Cataphractii. With a machine-amplified bellow, the venerable ancient punched through the glacis plate of a Chimera, flipping the tank over and demolishing the vehicle's turret. Aravain watched, numb to the horror, as men and walkers and scraps of nightmare worse than both forced a way past the Legion's champions. Human bike units revved their engines, veering around the stalled tanks to screech onto the long, flat road afforded them by the Uncus esplanade, taking potshots at the retreating legionaries.
'Every warrior here knows his duty,' Trigaine barked as twenty knights of the inner circle of Santales levelled their forbidden arsenal and took aim.
They opened fire.
Nerve induction shredders dropped men like marionettes, purging the brains of their electrical activity with vehemence enough to shatter an empyreal reflection. Gemynd blasters and lucidiron arc rifles attacked the cerebral cortex with the ferocity of a waking nightmare, sheer terror leading the soul to loosen its connection to the mortal spiral. Missiles bearing payloads of asphyx and sinistrum compounds alongside conventional explosives spread desolation and insanity even as they tore bodies asunder.
Every blast punched deeper into the world of the unreal and Aravain felt something scream from beyond its barriers, many voiced but singular in its ability to know pain. Aravain winced, his mental barriers dimming the mortis shriek but unable to mute it entirely.
The weapons of the Santales interfered with the normal patterns of the mind. No mental shield or exercise of Aravain's could block their effects. These were weapons built by the greatest warlord-scientists of humanity's darkest age to the express purpose of overcoming such wards. They obliterated the psychic utterly, further saturating the materium with a null-effect that would take years to dissipate. As a psyker himself, Aravain fell the effects more pronouncedly than his brothers.
Dark Steed lifted off with a howl of thrust before pivoting one hundred and eighty degrees and opening fire with its own upgraded armament. Its twin-linked heavy bolters had been replaced with psionic beam weaponry - the product of an unremembered people built to resist the irresistible. By such artifice had they endured Old Night. Centuries later they had sought then to resist the Dark Angels. The weapons survived.
The heavy guns mowed through khrave and men with equally explosive ease. Still firing, the Storm Eagle banked right, raking the thrall armour with fire, perforating the side of a Dracosan. The ensuing explosions pulped the mortals trapped inside, blasting their warp echoes into instant oblivion.
Aravain advanced on the breach at a walk, dispatching thrall-warriors with headshots until his pistol toned empty. A biker screeched into an impossible turn, evading his brothers' fire, then revved the vehicle's engine loudly and roared towards him.
Aravain drew his force sword.
The battle slowed to a stilted crawl as Aravain forced his mind towards the near future. He gritted his teeth and roared in effort, unable to pierce the psychic caul of the khrave presence.
With a shriek of tyre-rubber on rockcrete the present dragged him back.
Aravain ducked the biker's power maul, and then drove his force sword through the front fork. The mortal rider cried out in surprise as he was sent sailing over the handlebars. His neck bent on impact with the ground, an arm snapped. Even then, khrave domination might have been enough to compel the human back into the fight had Aravain's advancing brothers not gunned him down as he tried to pull a stub pistol from its hip holster.
Aravain extended a hand as a platoon of auxilia thralls in breacher gear poured out from between the vehicle jam around the breach. Electricity spat across his fingertips as he forced his mind's powers into the realm of the real.
With a snarl he splayed his hand and thrust it forward, arcane lightning raking across the rallying troopers. Where the energy touched the soulless matter of breather shields or vehicle armour it passed through without a mark, but on contact with living flesh it burned souls from bodies, the screams of the liberated echoing through the empyrean
'The Lion demands that we stress the khrave's psychic web.' said Trigaine. 'We need to kill something bigger than these thralls if our part in his plan is to be successful.'
Aravain turned to look back.
The courtyard around him was littered with shell casings and scrap ordnance, squads of black-armoured knights hurrying to reinforce this breach or to repel that teleportation strike. A pair of brooding Warhounds dominated the space, fifteen metres high, encased in an incomplete skeleton of aluminium bars, shouts and gunfire reports trilling through their ablative shells. With dulled eyes of mullioned armourglass, Canis Incaedium and Arsia Praedator glared down the cratered length
of the esplanade. Even in their enforced slumber, their princeps untrusted with an implement of war as deadly as a Titan, they were alpha beasts. Their lights were dark, weapons hanging heavy in their mounts, but their very nature was a threat to all who looked upon them, their existence alone enough to bend the logic of the battlefield towards it.
Where they went a man felt compelled to follow, and Aravain could not help but turn to see for himself what their sightless eyes beheld.
A khrave war machine. To describe it as a Titan fell like gross sacrilege, particularly in the shadow of two true god-machines of Mars. But no other frame of reference existed. The mind shrank from the horror of it and grasped for the comfort of the familiar.
It was a Titan.
From orbit, he had felt it, but proximity deadened the senses, the way staring overlong into a candle would bleach an unaugmented man's eyes. Despite its colossal scale it moved as silently as a shadow across a castle wall. Even as he watched its advance, Aravain could not ascertain its mode of locomotion, or even if it truly moved at all. Lascannon beams and tank-busting shells slammed ineffectually against the sheer nonconformity of its existence. It was like watching primitive simians throwing spears at a god.
'You are the Santales.'
Master Duriel strode across the courtyard to greet them, clad in heavily customised war-plate bearing the personalised heraldry of a hexagrammaton master. His armour had suffered in the battle, and Aravain could feel rather than merely see the work of the same breed of claws that had savaged his helmet aboard the Invincible Reason. A dozen warriors of the Ironwing escorted him out. firing sporadically as targets presented themselves, but for the most part devoting their energies to shepherding their commander through harm's way.
By the time he and his entourage approached Trigaine and the others, there were close to a hundred Knights of Santales there gathered, deposited by their respective transports.
'We are,' said Trigaine.
'The Lion told me to expect your aid, but not the form that aid would take. Your weapons are impressive.' He glanced back towards the wall. 'Gratitude, I believe, is in order.'
Lion El'Jonson- Lord of the First - David Guymer Page 14
