The power was there. It had never left him, instead following Rubio through his actions like a shadow in the warp. It came easily. It was potent, heady, and like his fury, it strained for liberation.
Tiny flickers of electric discharge danced between the tips of his fingers as he aimed his hands towards the advancing line of enemy Terminators. Without the shroud of a psychic hood to collimate it, his power would be fierce and hard to control, but Rubio was ready. If he did not do this, they would all die.
He knelt, and gave his rage its release.
A blinding blue daybreak took brief life as a massive blast of shimmering energy cascaded down in a wave, striking the Terminators. The brief storm of psionic discharge swept across the passageway and engulfed the Word Bearers, for the first time forcing them to scream in torment rather than zeal. Then, as the power found its level, the mouth of the tunnel above cracked and fractured, breaking under the strain of warp-kissed energy.
With a thunderous rumble, the roof caved inwards. Like the closing of a set of vast jaws, black stone slammed down, sealing off the passage and burying the Terminators under tons and tons of shattered rock.
Time blurred, there in the aftermath. Garro stalked through the lines of the other Ultramarines, all of them hesitant and unsure at what they had just witnessed. He knew by the motions of their helmets that they were speaking to one another on a coded vox-channel that he could not access, but it mattered little. He did not care to hear what they believed.
Garro found Rubio crouching in a circle of seared, fused stone. He offered his hand and the young Ultramarine took it, pulling himself up from the ground with a grunt of effort. The psyker removed his helmet and for the first time looked upon him with his own eyes. Garro mirrored the gesture, and the two warriors measured each other. He saw a great sadness and felt a sting of guilt at the knowledge he was its author.
‘It is done,’ Rubio said, his tone bleak. ‘The enemy is beaten and this path to Numinus is denied to them. And all it cost me was to defy my primarch and my Emperor.’
‘Your brothers survived,’ said Garro. ‘Take that as a reward.’
Rubio did not answer him. Instead, he moved around the figure in grey and took a step towards the other Ultramarines, who now gathered in a loose group, tending to their wounded.
They halted in their ministrations as Rubio came closer, and he stopped, seemingly unsure of what would happen next even as he had to know that it would.
As one, each of the battle-brothers of the 21st Company averted their eyes and turned their backs on Rubio. No matter that he had saved them, no matter that he had protected the path to the city from enemy invasion; he had disobeyed a decree absolute, and for that, the sons of Guilliman had no forgiveness.
Garro drew Libertas and Rubio spun at the ring of the blade upon its sheath, fixing him with a furious glare. ‘Are you satisfied?’ The other warrior spat the words. ‘Do you have what you came here for?’
‘Not yet.’ Garro held the sword out, the point down towards the ground. ‘Place your hand upon the blade.’
Rubio advanced, his anger towering. ‘You forced me into this! You cost me my brothers, and now you demand an oath?’
Garro shook his head slowly, and he gave voice to the truth of it. ‘These men are no longer your brothers. You are a ghost. Now place your hand on the blade.’
A torrent of conflicting emotions raged across Rubio’s face as the reality of his circumstances became clear, undeniable and resolute. At length, he removed a gauntlet and let it drop to the ground. Then he reached out and touched the sword. Garro gave a grave nod.
‘Tylos Rubio. Do you accept your role in this? Will you dedicate yourself to the orders of the Regent of Terra, and put aside all other claims upon your honour? Do you pledge yourself in this oath of moment?’
Something dark like sorrow flickered in the warrior’s eyes. ‘By this matter and this weapon, I so swear.’ He said the words as if they were a sentence of death. ‘I can do nothing else.’
Garro reveals his allegiance to the Ultramarines on Calth
Three
Remade
A summons
In Bellus, Veritas
When the ship left the warp, Tylos Rubio finally understood where he was being taken, and gained the first true inkling of what that might mean for his future. He sensed the vessel transition from the madness of the warp and return to real space, the impression of the change pressing in on his mind even though he did not wish it.
There were no guards posted outside his quarters, but he had no doubt he was under surveillance as he made his way down the corridor, to an observation cupola that grew out of the starship’s outer hull. There, he stood and watched as the smoky disc of distant Jupiter passed by them, and knew that he had come to Sol. To the seat of the Imperium itself.
Rubio had never seen Terra with his own eyes. A son of the Five Hundred Worlds, born and bred on mighty Ultramar, he felt a connection to the Throneworld in the loyalty to Emperor and Imperium that was central to his nature as a Space Marine. But that connection was an ephemeral thing, an ideal rather than an emotion. In a way, Terra had always seemed distant to Rubio, far removed from the battles and duties he fought in its name.
But now it was real. He stood watch for hours, until the planet grew through the cupola from an indistinct dot against the void to a dark orb lit by a halo of gargantuan works about it. Shipyards. Gun shoals. Command stations. The decorations of war-to-come surrounded the planet, and the sight brought an odd chill to Rubio’s blood.
Then the ship turned away and the dead landscape of Luna filled the view.
He became aware of a crew servitor waiting in the corridor nearby. ‘Speak,’ he told it.
The machine-slave did not. Instead, it offered him a folded slip of plaspaper bearing an embossed seal – and within he found what would be the first order of his new existence.
The summons brought Rubio to the highest tier of the Somnus Citadel, and in the harsh monochrome light he saw Garro on the far side of the glass-walled chamber. The other warrior stood like a sentinel, a statue of ceramite and steel, bone and flesh. In his plain armour, the former Death Guard seemed somehow unfinished. His hairless, scarred scalp was lined with the furrow of his brow, and his eyes were eternally watchful. If Rubio looked closer, he knew he would see the edges of regret that ran deep in the warrior’s heart. But it was not seemly to speak of such a thing. It was not his place.
His place. Was there such a thing for Rubio now? He pulled his nondescript robe tighter around his shoulders. Beneath it, he wore fatigues of simple cut, the sort of thing in which a Legion-serf or indentured helot might be garbed.
They had taken away all that had showed his Legion and his fealty, and Rubio had not given it easily. The Ultramarine had finally allowed his armour to be removed, and only then on the express order of the Regent himself. Still, he greatly begrudged it.
There was a truth that he had never voiced, but standing here in this great hall, it made itself plain to him. Little by little, the Great Crusade had chipped away at Tylos Rubio.
At the start, he had been a Codicier, a ranked brother of the Librarius. A war-psychic at the head of his Legion’s 21st Company, fighting for the triumph of Ultramar with courage and honour. Alongside his primarch, he marched for Macragge beneath banners of blue and gold. Memories of those days were bittersweet. There had been such glory, with many enemies dispatched and many worlds saved from the abyss. Through it all, Rubio had used his unique, preternatural talents as a superlative weapon. He was a psyker, a warrior of the mind, capable of calling lightning from his hands and spinning dread through the hearts of his foes. He had been so very, very good at it.
Magnus the Red took that from him.
The lord of the Thousand Sons Legion, a mighty psyker in his own right, had earned the Emperor’s displeasure by dabbling with the darker powers
of the psychic realm. Magnus’ reckless games with the warp earned harsh censure, and in the aftermath, the Emperor forbade the use of any psychic power across all Legions, to preclude any future chance of misuse. With a single edict, Rubio’s ultimate ability was forbidden to him.
But he was still a warrior of the Legiones Astartes. Even without his mind-amplifying psychic hood and with his greatest weapon silenced, he could still fight for the Imperium with blade and boltgun. And in the moments when his hobbled status troubled him, Rubio would remain stoic and show nothing. After all, he had still been an Ultramarine.
But now that too had been taken.
On battle-scarred Calth, as the sky blackened, Rubio lost something that could never be measured. To save the lives of his kinsmen, he had made a terrible choice, and the echo of it had clouded his mind all the way back to Sol. Rubio had broken the Emperor’s edict and called upon his shackled powers to beat back the enemy. In doing so, he had betrayed a sworn oath. His battle-brothers lived, but as one they turned their backs upon him.
Does that make me… a traitor? Rubio pushed the disturbing thought away, but it lingered, like a thunderhead on the far horizon. ‘I am here, Garro,’ he said. ‘What do you want of me?’
The battle-captain turned to study him, his eyes searching Rubio’s face for some measure of his mood. ‘The voyage back from the Veridian System was arduous. Are you rested?’
‘I am ready to return to the battle, if that is what you mean.’
Garro shook his head. ‘We have not been called to fight a war, Rubio. Other men will challenge Horus’ rebellion in open conflict. We… We are on a different path.’
‘And where does it lead?’ Irritation flared in him. ‘You dragged me away from my brethren. You took me from my rightful place. Tell me it was for good reason!’ Rubio cast a look down at his characterless robes. ‘What duty can I undertake like this? Where is my armour? Where are my weapons?’
The other legionary’s reply was solemn. ‘Your wargear was your last connection to your Legion, brother. You no longer need it.’ Garro turned towards the windows and gestured towards the black and grey beyond. ‘Look out there.’
Rubio frowned, but did as he was asked. Out past the thick glassaic panes, there was only the airless wilderness of the lunar surface, and rising up above the rocks and craters, the curtain of great night. Stars, hard and bright like diamond, cast out the lines of the galaxy beyond.
‘Millions of worlds and billions of souls upon them,’ said Garro. ‘Each one with a gun to their head, for assurance of fealty. Each with a blade at their neck, ready to take blood for sacrifice. But you know as well as I, brother. I imagine you hear the cries of the dead and the betrayed louder than I ever could.’
Unbidden, the spectre of distant gunfire, of screaming and the sounds of battle, rose and fell in Rubio’s thoughts, as if from a faint memory. He stiffened.
Garro went on. ‘A war like no other has come to the Imperium of Mankind, and I was cursed to be there at the birth of it.’ He opened his arms to the other legionary. ‘I was once a battle-captain of the XIV Legiones Astartes, the Death Guard. Like you, one of the Emperor’s chosen Angels of Death. We shared the same mission as the sons of Ultramar… The bringing of illumination. The greatest undertaking in human history, to forge a transgalactic empire that would be glorious and eternal.’ He looked away, sorrow flashing in his eyes. ‘Such a grand dream. A magnificent endeavour. But broken now. Shattered and crumbling to ashes. The Emperor’s plan has been ruined by the most petty and human of things. Treachery.’
‘Horus Lupercal.’ The name fell from Rubio’s lips in synchrony with Garro’s statement. The Warmaster and his foul deeds were so inexorably linked in the legionary’s thoughts that it could be no other way. The primarch of the XVI Legion had rebelled against his father, and even after days of reading the reports and missives explaining the horror of it, Rubio still found it hard to grasp.
‘Some said it was from a kind of madness, others that he had been poisoned by xenos influence,’ said Garro. ‘But I have come to believe it was something base and simple that took Horus to betrayal’s path. Jealousy, resentment, distrust… These most human emotions are still extant in a warlord like Horus, even though the great primarchs were meant to be above such matters. It is troubling to admit, brother. If those so mighty can fall, what hope is there for us?’ His gaze turned back towards the legionary. ‘Can we transcend what we are? Will true illumination forever be beyond our reach?’
Rubio could find no answer. Against all reason, Horus’ call to revolt had not died unborn. Others – the Emperor’s Children, the World Eaters, Iron Warriors and Word Bearers among them – were joining the bloody rebellion. And now, across a galaxy split by terrible warp storms, they burned planets once held in the Imperium’s name. If what he had been told was true, then world by world and star by star, the madness he had witnessed first-hand on Calth was inching ever closer to Terra and the Emperor’s throne.
Garro’s gaze dropped, and his voice became a whisper. ‘To my eternal disgrace, I saw my own Legion follow Horus into disloyalty, led by my gene-father Mortarion. I watched powerlessly as my battle-brothers spat on their vows and took the Death Guard to the traitor’s banner.’
‘And yet you live still. Spared by both your turncoat kinsmen and those still loyal.’ Rubio’s bitterness coloured the words. ‘How so?’
If Garro noted Rubio’s mordant tone, he did not comment on it. ‘In defiance of my master, for daring to choose Emperor over Legion, I was marked for death. And in the end, I fled the devastation at Isstvan where the war began, racing for Terra to carry the warning of Horus’ intentions.’ He took a long breath. ‘I am Death Guard no longer. My armour has no mark upon it but for the brand of the Sigillite. As Horus – may his name be cursed – and his followers threw off their loyalty, so I have shed my old identity and been made anew. I stand before you now, a warrior without brothers, a legionary with no Legion.’ A bleak smile pulled briefly at his mouth. ‘What was the name you gave me on Calth? Yes. I recall. I am a Knight Errant, cast against a dark background. I have a new oath, to be the Sigillite’s hand amid the murk and the fire of this hateful schism.’
Despite his circumstances, Rubio could not hold back his curiosity. ‘To what end, Garro?’
‘For the future…’ He gestured towards the darkness, and Rubio followed his direction, finding Terra low in the sky, half in shadow. ‘Somewhere upon that sphere, the Emperor is at work on designs so complex that none can comprehend them. In the meantime, we must protect Him from whatever threats come to pass. And there are such great threats at hand, Rubio. You saw a sliver of that on Calth, and I must tell you there is far, far worse ahead of us.’
The hard certainty behind Garro’s words gave Rubio pause. There was no deceit in him. The other warrior’s expression spoke of what sickening truths he had been exposed to, and of the anger it kindled.
At length, Garro beckoned Rubio to follow him. ‘Come with me. We will make you ready.’
‘For what?’
‘For the new conflict.’
The Somnus Citadel’s armoury was a forge of war, with dozens of machine-slaves and techno-serfs busy at the repair and maintenance of battle gear. The golden armour and shining great-swords of the Sisters of Silence, the Citadel’s keepers, dominated the chamber. Their blades hung from every wall, alongside powerful flame cannons and assault guns. But as impressive as they were, none of these instruments of conflict could ever match the weapons of the Legiones Astartes.
Garro led Rubio towards an alcove where a group of patient servitors stood at attention. ‘There, brother. Do you see?’ He pointed towards an arming rack six metres in height, upon which lay a suit of power armour almost identical to his own wargear.
It was a highly advanced build, fresh from the manufactorum, and like Garro’s armour, it was denuded of sigil and symbol, save for the discr
eet rendition of a stylised eye, almost indistinct upon one of the pauldrons – the mark of the Sigillite. A simple Librarius tabard hung from the waist. At Rubio’s approach, the arming rack hissed open and servitors gathered, ready to assist him in donning the ceramite plate.
He hesitated. In his service to the Imperium, Rubio had never worn anything but the cobalt-blue of the Ultramarines, never borne any sigil but the Legion’s revered Ultima. To consider doing so now would seem like a kind of betrayal. Garro understood the sentiment only too well.
‘If I accept this…’ began Rubio, ‘what becomes of me? I will lose what I was. I will no longer be a son of Ultramar.’
‘This is not about Legion or birthplace,’ Garro told him. ‘This is a matter of greater import than the world you called home or the primarch you saluted. You and I, and the others to come – we give our loyalty to a new truth. A new ideal. We remember what we were, but rise to something beyond. We serve the Emperor of Mankind. That will never change. You swore an oath of moment on Calth, Rubio. Now make it whole. Take the armour. Join me.’
For a long moment, Garro thought the Codicier might refuse him and strike out in fury, but then that urge faded from his eyes and he nodded. ‘Very well.’
Rubio mounted the rack, and spread his arms wide to accept the martial embrace of open brassarts, vambraces and breastplate. Servitors secured the torso sections and greaves, the thick-set boots and gauntlets. He tipped back his head as the gorget locked into place, and with a low, bone-deep purr of coiled power, the micro-fusion generator in the armour’s backpack became active. Next, the pauldrons settled into place. Piece by piece, Rubio became a war machine in the figure of a man.
Garro recalled the moment where he had stood in the same place, remembering how it had troubled him deeply. Rubio was passing through the same turning point now, uneasy with the oath he had cemented by this act. His former identity was lost to him now, and in its place he had gained a new status, one he had yet to be certain of. I know, brother, Garro wanted to say. I know how this feels.
Garro Page 5
