‘These are just the ones the Numitor brought back.’ Raldoron was grim. ‘The frigate’s commander informed me that they found hundreds scattered across a dozen derelicts, just like these poor souls.’
Meros felt a twist of revulsion in his gut. It was unimaginable to contemplate what kind of death these men and women had endured. Had they been… aware when it happened to them?
Furio glanced at Raldoron. ‘We are clearly dealing with a new kind of xenos weapon, First Captain.’
Raldoron nodded once. ‘I’ve seen enough. The primarch must be informed.’ The cold, flinty lenses of his helmet scanned them. ‘Word of what you have seen here is not to be discussed without permission from your commanding officer, is that clear?’
‘Clear,’ said the other Apothecary.
Meros took a moment longer to answer; he was remembering a moment many years before, another similar order from the First Captain after he had been in battle against the nephilim.
‘So ordered,’ he replied.
SIX
Fear
Phorus
The Stars Go Out
There was no place for Sanguinius on the bridge of his flagship. He had made it so; his command throne remained in his private sanctum in the upper reaches of the Red Tear’s dorsal tower, but for all intents and purposes there was no formal seat of power here for him. It was a small humility that had been enforced across the Blood Angels warfleet from the very beginning of his reign. The primarch refused to take the captain’s chair of any craft in his fleet, lest it be seen as a diminishment of the authority of that vessel’s commanding officer. He stood with one hand upon the high back of Admiral DuCade’s station as the shipmistress governed her crew. He remained statue-still and silent; as did the members of his honour guard, who waited in recesses draped with crimson curtains to the port and starboard sides of the bridge deck.
The Red Tear’s command-and-control nexus resembled a small combat arena or a theatre in the round. At its lowest level, there were the primary operations consoles manned by DuCade and her prime cadre of naval officers. Then, raised up in three tiers like the stands for an audience, there were semi-circles of secondary and tertiary workstations for the rest of the command crew, the gunnery and engineering officers, the sensor specialists and more. Rather than raise the captain of the ship high above all things to look down on her men in the manner of some haughty queen at court, the admiral was at the centre of everything, the fulcrum of the starship and the fleet it led.
Only one being was allowed the honour of being placed above all. In the ceiling over their heads, a shallow bowl of silver metal worked with constellations and star-device etchings showed the lowermost surface of a habitat sphere, where the Red Tear’s Navigators lived in zero gravity. Locked away behind thick walls of sense-deadening baffles, with the ship in normal space the psykers were at rest, in a kind of dormant coma-state.
Their distaff cousins, the astropaths, were not so lucky. Their hab-module was deeper inside the warship’s hull, protected by layers of heavy armour and energy barriers. Arcane technologies connected them to mechanisms for psychic thought-projection, infinitely byzantine systems that fascinated the primarch with their intricate complexity.
The word from the astropathic sanctum was not promising. Sanguinius had bid them to reach into the Signus Cluster with their minds and listen for the whisper of communiqués from others of their kind. The vox-dead static picked up by the fleet’s machine-call transceivers troubled him more than he had revealed, and he had hoped that the telepaths might find some trace deeper into the star system – something to indicate that the Blood Angels had not arrived too late to save these worlds.
When he asked them what they heard, the psykers wept and spoke in synesthesic riddles, becoming so agitated that he became concerned they might harm themselves. In the end, without answers, Sanguinius left them under guard and returned to the bridge. Whatever tricks his enemy had used to silence Signus seemed to extend into the ethereal as much as the real.
‘I do not know what to make of this, my lord.’ DuCade’s voice brought him back from his moment of reverie. The admiral was offering him the pict-slate he had given to her a few minutes earlier. On its glassy surface, captures from the gun cameras of a Raven scrolled slowly past, showing frozen images of a field of wreckage and plasma spills against the void. ‘The damage patterns resemble the effect of an explosive detonation deep inside the ship-frame.’ She craned her neck to look up at him, the tiny woman surrounded by the broad metal cradle of her chair.
He nodded, threads of his blond hair falling over his face. ‘My thoughts too,’ agreed the Angel. ‘But the scans show no signs of thermal damage, no traces common to a chemical or nuclear detonation.’
She nodded, frowning. ‘No exotic particles either, which means it couldn’t be an esoteric weapon, like a graviton shear or a conversion beamer.’ DuCade looked away, silently giving an order to a junior officer with the tip of her head, without breaking the conversation. ‘Those wrecks look like they were torn apart from the inside.’
‘Like cages ripped open by a vicious animal.’ Azkaellon hove closer, catching the edges of the conversation. He bowed slightly to his liege lord. ‘I cannot understand how or why these craft were even in this zone of space. Most of them had no warp motors and were incapable of speeds beyond one-half light velocity, and yet they appeared to be making for interstellar space. It would have taken them centuries to reach the nearest star system, a millennium more to the closest Imperial world.’
‘To answer that question, Guard Commander,’ said DuCade, ‘requires something the Legiones Astartes do not possess.’
‘And that is?’
‘Fear.’ Sanguinius detected the shift in her pulse rate through a microscopic colour change in her pale cheeks and the motion of her thin hands. She went on. ‘Consider this. The people on those ships were so afraid that they willingly sought out the embrace of the deep black. A prospect for slow starvation as their food supplies dwindled, suffocation or freezing at the failure of life-support.’
‘Perhaps they held on to the hope of finding a rescuer out here,’ said the primarch, for a moment trying to place himself in that mindset. ‘But there was no one to aid them. No one to forestall the fate that ultimately claimed them.’
‘They feared this death less than the terror that chased them from their homes,’ offered Azkaellon, with a grimace. ‘That notion is as alien to me as any xenos.’
‘Admiral?’ DuCade’s augmented aide approached the commander. ‘Bow observers report we are coming into visual range of the planet Phorus. Fleet speed is reducing as per your posted orders. We will cross the outer perimeter of the Signus system in approximately two minutes.’
‘Sound battle stations throughout the flotilla,’ she responded. ‘Show me the planet.’
The officer saluted and turned to face the front of the command deck. ‘Lens the eye!’ At his order, the open bow of the semi-circular amphitheatre widened and the wide armourglass portals looking out into the dark shifted. The molecules of the clear material were stroked by electromagnetic charges that shifted the density and structure of the largest portal, a flawless disc set in an elliptical framework that resembled a human eye. The view outside sharpened, bringing the bow of the Red Tear into hard detail along with her escorts. The battleships Ignis and Covenant of Baal moved off the great barge’s beam, and past them the light of Signus Alpha bent around the sphere of Phorus. Red-lit, it was a hazy shadow becoming more defined with each passing moment.
It was the primarch who first sensed that something was amiss. ‘Azkaellon,’ he said, beckoning the Guard Commander. ‘Do you see? The colour?’
The Sanguinary Guard shot a look at a nearby systems console, where one of the sub-light navigational crewmen was working. On the woman’s gas-lens screen there was a cogitator-generated image dredged up from the depths of the Red Tear’s commodious data mines; a picture assembled from probe readings and the logs of the
Imperial colonial census office, the standard planetary catalogue entry for Signus VII, local designation Phorus.
The image showed an unremarkable ball of rock and ice, scarred by asteroid impact craters. It resembled a sphere made of porcelain webbed with jagged lines, as if dropped from a great height and then reassembled.
‘The reflectivity of it is wrong,’ Sanguinius told him.
Phorus’s dirty white colouration should have made it stand out starkly against the bloody light of the star, but instead the planet was drinking in all the illumination it was given, absorbing it.
‘All ships within lead element,’ called DuCade. ‘Target Phorus with sensing gear and report.’
Immediately, information began to stream into the Red Tear’s data buffers. Azkaellon saw dozens of support screens light up along the upper tiers as cogitators laboured to interpret the new readings.
‘Phorus was home to ninety thousand colonists,’ the primarch offered, his eyes on the forward portal. ‘But I fear no longer. Look at the surface.’
The Guard Commander’s perception caught up with what he was seeing and the image shifted in his mind’s eye. Phorus was not, as he had thought, caught in an partial eclipse of a star and so rendered dark by shadow.
The planet appeared burned, seared black from pole to pole. No features were visible, and all other colour was utterly absent.
‘Report from the Ignis,’ said DuCade’s aide. ‘They shot a probe into the planet’s gravity well. The drone shows no trace of atmospherics or ambient energy output.’
‘They were in the process of terraforming Phorus,’ insisted the Angel. ‘There will be signifiers.’
‘Yes, my lord.’ The major bowed slightly. ‘I mean, no, my lord. There’s nothing there. The probe’s telemetry shows a world that is completely dead. Lifeless. Right down to the microscopic level.’
Azkaellon watched his master become very still, the slight movement of his great wings folded against his armour the only motion from him.
‘Lord Sanguinius,’ said the admiral. ‘How do you wish to proceed? We’ll be crossing Phorus orbit in one minute.’
‘There’s nothing for us here,’ said the primarch, after a moment. ‘Maintain course and heading in towards the core of the system.’
The Guard Commander found he could not turn his gaze away from the corpse of a planet as it drifted past the bow of the Red Tear, falling level with the flagship as it passed into the system proper.
And then, like the eye of an ocean predator rolling slowly to follow the movement of a prey animal, Phorus moved.
Shifting in place, the black orb began to change aspect, turning against its normal rotation, the scorched surface rippling. Alarms sounded on a dozen consoles as sensor-servitors detected events that did not tally with any planetary motion known or predicted by their programmers.
Sanguinius surged forwards, coming to the armourglass of the portal, his hands pressing on the clear barrier. ‘Admiral! Order the fleet to extend the distance from Phorus, now!’
‘What…’ Azkaellon struggled for a moment to frame his question, as DuCade snapped out the order behind him. ‘What is happening down there?’
‘I don’t know,’ his master replied, the answer sending a ripple of ice through him.
In plain sight of every starship of the Blood Angels fleet, Phorus turned and turned, passing through an impossibly fast day-night cycle, moving as if its connection to the laws of nature had been severed. The dark sphere finally found a kind of equilibrium, presenting what had been its southern polar regions to the Red Tear and all those who watched through viewports and screen-relays.
New colour, a violent flame-orange among the dead black, emerged in points of burning light across the curvature of Phorus’s ruined surface. If a being could have stood upon the planet and lived, they would have witnessed decapitated mountains painted soot-dark sinking into abyssal sinkholes, and great chasms opening up from horizon to horizon. Magma flame jetted high into the air, ejected from the deep core of the planet, hot enough that the hellish glow was visible from orbital space.
And from above – only from above – the full dimension of what was being wrought upon Phorus was slowly becoming clear. At first it seemed that the planet was suffering a sudden and inexplicable geological catastrophe. The gravity of the outpost world went into wild flux as cracks wider than the reach of oceans spread across the surface.
Planets died this way, collapsing under their own mass and breaking apart; it was a common occurrence if one thought in astronomical terms. But never like this, without warning or precursor, seemingly triggered by the arrival of an audience to witness it.
Phorus was not dying; this was something else entirely.
Following lines of circumference, the monstrous fissures spread about the planet, and against all reason they propagated in perfect rows, one crossing over the other, each of them slicing through layers of blackened rock and burned ice. Landmasses splintered in a mathematical symmetry that was too precise, too flawless to be the action of tortured nature. It seemed as if an invisible artisan of godlike scope cradled Phorus in claws of force, cutting lines into the ruined surface as a man might delicately slice into the skin of a ripe fruit.
It ended as swiftly as it had begun, the planet briefly possessing and then losing a new atmosphere as a huge volume of toxic gases escaped from the flaming rocky mantle, boiling into space. Phorus’s landscape had been grotesquely altered, sculpted into a web of magma-choked canyons, each broad enough to drown a hive-city. A grand design emerged from it all, at once seamless and horrific.
From the bridge of the Red Tear the sigil was clearly visible, burning like a brand upon the darkness. The lines of flame passed together and crossed over, one after another, so that they formed a brazen star with eight points.
The primarch broke the stunned silence that had fallen across the command deck, turning away from the smouldering corpse of the planet. ‘It’s a message.’
‘What does it mean?’ The major’s voice trembled.
‘Mark me,’ said Sanguinius, showing his teeth, ‘I will have the answer to that question, even if I must rip it from the throats of our enemies.’ He delivered the words with cold, feral intent. ‘If this is meant to unman us, the xenos have underestimated the will of the–’
‘My lord.’ Admiral DuCade rose from her command throne, and with one hand she pressed a vox-pod to her right ear. ‘A priority message from the heavy cruiser Chalice.’
Azkaellon recalled the ship’s name; it was part of the fleet’s sternguard force, trailing a few hundred kilometres back along the line of the formation. The primarch shot her a look as DuCade went on.
‘And the same report from several others now…’ The tinny mutter of overlapping communications signals was audible from the brassy pod. She held it away, trying to compose herself as best a woman could when she had such news to impart. ‘Primarch, the captain of the Chalice and several picket ships around the edges of the flotilla are reporting the occurrence of an unusual astronomical phenomenon.’
Sanguinius turned back to the great portal and peered out, past the fires of ruined Phorus. Azkaellon came closer, and as he did he heard the Angel release a gasp.
Sanguinius pointed, raising his gauntlet to the void. ‘There. Do you see it?’
The Guard Commander grimaced as he looked; then he too felt his breath catch in his throat. ‘The stars…’
Beyond the baleful red glow of Signus Alpha and the shimmers of its sister suns, the scattering of stars and nebulae that lay within sight of the Red Tear were changing. Azkaellon had the sudden impression of a colossal curtain falling across a stage the size of a galaxy. A great veil, impenetrable and stygian, blotting out everything.
Struck silent, he stood at the Angel’s side and watched the stars go out.
Some say that the Triumph at Ullanor began with the echo of the first shot fired against the greenskin hordes of the Overlord Urlakk Urg, others that it was marked by th
e blood shed when Horus Lupercal pitched the monstrous alien from the balcony of the great keep, to die broken against the flagstones far below. In the end, it was only the victory that mattered, and the hard-fought road that millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of legionaries had cut into the heart of the ork onslaught.
The great mass of the xenos had threatened to break open the new bonds forged by the Great Crusade, and so a cohort of warriors from across the noble Legions came together to shatter this threat before it could spread beyond the sector, where the green tide rose with each passing day.
Under the command of Horus, the Luna Wolves took the fight to the heart of Urg’s war machine, blinding the alien army with a massive feint. Even as his father, the Emperor, led the common soldiery and phalanxes of Titan battle walkers across Ullanor Majoris, it was Horus who struck the killing blow.
With Urg’s termination the nascent ork empire self-destructed, and the xenos that were not hounded into the mud of Ullanor’s vast battlegrounds would be hunted down across hundreds of star systems, all the way to Chondax, the Kayvas Belt and beyond.
The victory was sealed in blood and iron, and the call to Triumph was sounded. By the Emperor’s command, Ullanor was remade as a trophy world, designated Mundus Tropaeum on all galactic maps and records of tithe. It would be a site of glory and spectacle to cement not only this single conquest over the forces ranged against humankind, but a greater symbol of the Crusade itself. For two hundred Terran years the Emperor’s mighty endeavour had moved across the face of the galaxy to bring unity and illumination to the lost daughter-worlds of Old Earth. It had pushed back the night, re-forged old links between civilisations, battled alien threats – and with regret, it had often given punishment. A change was coming, though, a change that found its fulcrum on Ullanor.
None who walked upon that world knew that the echo of that Triumph would sound for decades, for centuries, for millennia.
Geoformer platoons from the Mechanicum brought world engines and mobile stone-burners to cut a massive swath across the broken landscape left in the battle’s wake. Orkish dead were buried in their millions with their savage ruins, interred beneath transplanted rocks and the heads of crushed mountains. The Mechanicum eradicated every last remaining trace of the enemy and paved over them with a giant boulevard, a parade stage as wide as the footprint of some cities.
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