‘Saul Tarvitz, my honour brother and friend, brought me a forewarning. In risk to his own life, he fled the ships of the Emperor’s Children to the planet below in order to tell our kinsmen down there that a viral attack is imminent. For this, Eidolon attempted to have him killed before he could succeed.’ Garro nodded again. ‘I chose not to follow that command. As a result, Saul is on Isstvan III as we speak, doubtless rallying men of the Legiones Astartes to find cover before the attack begins. My faith in what he told me is ironclad, as strong to me as my bond is to you.’ He extended a hand and tapped Hakur on the shoulder, then began to walk around the room. Garro met the gaze of each person there as he did so, impressing his own truth upon them. ‘Here is the horrific truth. Grulgor and Eidolon are not two errant souls pursuing some personal agenda, but soldiers in a war of betrayal that is about to unfold. What they have done is not of their own volition, but under the orders of the Warmaster himself.’ He ignored the scattering of gasps that the statement brought forth. ‘Horus, with the support of Angron, Fulgrim, and though it sickens me to say it, our master Mortarion, has done this.’
Across the chamber, Carya almost collapsed into an observation chair. He was struggling to make sense of Garro’s words. Vought stood beside him, her face twisted as if she were ready to be physically ill. ‘Why?’ asked the shipmaster. ‘Terra take me if I can see the logic and truth in all this, but why would he do it? What would Horus have to gain by turning against the Emperor?’
‘Everything,’ muttered Decius.
Voyen’s head bobbed in a rueful nod. ‘There has been talk of the Warmaster at second- and third-hand in the lodges. Talk of how far away the Emperor is, and of discontent over the commands of the Council of Terra. The tone of things has been strained ever since Horus was injured at Davin, after he returned from his healing.’
‘The very tip of treason’s blade, glimpsed in hidden places,’ said Sendek.
Garro pressed on. ‘Horus personally chose all the units for the assault on the Choral City. He picked only the men he knew would not turn if he called them to his banner. The bombing will rid him of the only obstacle to open insurrection.’
‘If this is so,’ demanded Decius, ‘then why are we not down there as well? Your staunch loyalty to the Emperor and Terra is hardly a secret, sir!’
Garro gave a cold smile and tapped on the thigh plate of his armour. ‘If the Warsinger on Isstvan Extremis had not forced this piece of pig-iron on me, I have no doubt we would be alongside Temeter and his troops, unaware that a sword is poised at our necks, but the turn of events has played in our favour, and we must seize our opportunity.’
‘Tarvitz’s escape will not remain undiscovered forever,’ said Vought. ‘When the Warmaster learns of what you did, Eisenstein will be under the guns of the entire fleet.’
‘I have no doubt of that,’ Garro agreed. ‘We have a few hours, at most.’
‘What do you propose?’ asked Sendek. ‘This frigate is only one ship. We cannot hope to assist the ground forces by intercepting the bombardments or attempting to engage the Warmaster.’
Garro shook his head. ‘If Saul succeeds, we’ll have no need to stop the bombing. If not…’ He swallowed hard. ‘There is nothing we can do to help those men.’
Decius saw it first. ‘You plan to flee.’
‘Watch your tone!’ snapped Hakur.
Decius ignored the veteran. ‘You want us to run.’
‘We have no choice. If we remain, we will perish, but if we can get this ship out of the system, there is a chance we can still stem the tide of this treachery. We must finish the mission that Saul Tarvitz began. We must carry the warning of this perfidy to Terra and the Emperor.’ He looked at the dark-skinned man. ‘Master Carya, can the Eisenstein make space for the Sol system, or at the very least a star close to the Imperial core?’
He shook his head slowly. ‘On any other day I would say it could, but today, I cannot be certain.’
‘The warp has become increasingly clouded in recent weeks, full of storms and turbulence,’ Vought broke in. ‘Interstellar travel has become very difficult. If we attempted to translate now, our Navigators would be virtually sightless.’
‘But you could still make the jump,’ Hakur noted. ‘We could still get away, even if we went into the warp blind.’
Carya snorted. ‘The ship would be cast to the etheric currents! We could find ourselves light-years off the charts… anywhere!’
‘Anywhere but here,’ said Garro with finality. ‘I want preparations made. Baryk, Racel.’ He fixed them with a hard eye, using their given names for the first time. ‘Will you resist me on this?’
The two naval officers exchanged glances, and he saw that they were with him. ‘No,’ said the shipmaster, ‘many of my men are faithful Terrans and they won’t falter, but there are some who will baulk. I imagine I have men who follow Horus among my crew.’
‘There’s also the matter of Grulgor’s other Astartes on board,’ added Sendek. ‘They will be asking questions very soon.’
Garro looked to Hakur. ‘Hakur, take what you need and secure the ship. Apply whatever force is required, understood?’
There was a moment of silence as the reality of Garro’s command became clear. Then the veteran saluted. ‘Aye, lord.’
Garro bent over the control dais and unwrapped the cloth bundle he had brought with him. In it were a dozen thin slips of paper dense with writing in a quick, forceful hand. The battle-captain handed one to everybody in the observatorium, including Carya and Vought.
The woman frowned at the piece of parchment. ‘What is this?’
‘An oath of moment,’ said Decius. ‘We will swear our duty upon it.’
Garro opened his mouth to speak, but the clang of the hatch stilled his tongue. The communications officer blundered headlong into the observatorium and skidded to a halt, mouth agape at the clandestine meeting he had interrupted.
‘Maas!’ bellowed Carya. ‘For Terra’s sake, man! Knock before you enter!’
‘Your pardon, sir,’ puffed the vox operator, ‘but this priority signal came in for Commander Grulgor’s eyes only. He doesn’t answer—’
Carya snatched a data-slate from him and paled as he scanned it. He read aloud. ‘It’s from Typhon on the Terminus Est. Message reads: Weapons free, bombardment to commence imminently. Permission granted to terminate any and all impediments to operation.’
All eyes turned to Garro. The subtext of the message was clear. Typhon was handing Grulgor the authority to kill Garro and his men. He held up the paper. ‘The oath, then,’ he rumbled, pausing to take a breath. ‘Do you accept your role in this? Will you dedicate yourself to the safe carriage of the warning to Terra, no matter what forces are ranged against us? Do you pledge to do honour to the XIV Legion and the Emperor?’ The captain drew Libertas and held the sword point down.
Hakur was the first to place his hand upon the blade. ‘By this matter and this weapon, I so swear.’ One by one, the Astartes followed suit, with Decius the last. Then Carya and Vought gave the vow as well, as Maas looked on wide-eyed.
As they filed from the chamber, Decius caught his commander’s arm. ‘Fine words,’ he said, ‘but who was there to act as witness to them?’
Garro pointed out at the stars. ‘The Emperor.’
NINE
A Prayer
Rain of Death
Refugees
HE WAS ALONE in the barracks compartment. Hakur and the others were out about the ship, executing his orders to take Eisenstein under their complete control. Distantly, Garro thought he heard the faint echoes of bolter reports, and his lips thinned. There was only a handful of Grulgor’s men still at large on board the frigate. Like his Seventh Company, the majority of the late commander’s Second was scattered elsewhere about the fleet, with only a few squads here to oppose Garro’s plans. Carya’s willing agreement to take the oath of moment had cemented his trust in the shipmaster, and through him he had control of the bridge officers. He
had no doubt there would be malcontents among the naval ratings, but they would quickly fall into line when the Astartes gave them orders, and if they refused, they would not live for long.
By rights he should have been out there doing the job of securing the ship himself, but the thundering churn of emotion inside him was making it hard for Garro to concentrate. He needed a moment with his own counsel, to centre himself in the face of the events that had been set in motion.
Over and over he thought of the men he had fought alongside in the hosts of the Death Guard and wondered how and why they could turn their faces from the Emperor. For the most part, his brothers were good and honourable men, and Garro thought he knew the colour of their hearts, but now he doubted that certainty. The awful realisation of it was, not that his kinsmen were ready to shake off the Emperor’s commands and embrace treachery, but that most of them were merely weapons. They would not pause when orders came to them, even if those orders were beyond their comprehension.
It was the lot of an Astartes simply to do, not to question, and he felt damned by the understanding that Horus would play that unswerving allegiance to his bitter ends. He had considered briefly the idea of opening up all of Eisenstein’s vox transmitters to maximum power and broadcasting the truth of the treachery across the entire 63rd Fleet. There were noble men out there, he was sure of it, warriors like Loken and Torgaddon in the Warmaster’s own Legion, and Varren of the World Eaters… If only he could contact them, save their lives; but to do so would have meant suicide for everyone on the frigate.
Every minute they kept their silence was a minute more for Garro to plan an escape with the warning. Kinsmen like Loken and the others would have to find their own path through this nightmare. The message was far more important than the lives of a handful of Astartes. Garro only hoped that once his mission had been fulfilled he might see them again, either back on Terra at the end of their own escape or here once more with a reprisal fleet at his back. For now, those men were on their own, as were Garro and his warriors.
The battle-captain crossed to the arming alcove that Kaleb had set aside for him, seeing the eagle cuirass mounted there on a stand. It was polished and perfect, as if the armour had come from a museum and not been battered in combat less than a week ago. He laid a hand on the cool ceramite and allowed himself to feel his full regret at the housecarl’s death. ‘You died well, Kaleb Arin,’ he told the air, ‘you did honour to the Death Guard and to the Seventh.’ Garro wished that he could promise the man’s memory some form of tribute. He wanted to place the serf’s name upon the Wall of Memory on Barbarus, give him the credit as if he had been a full-fledged battle-brother, but that would not happen, not now. Garro doubted that he would ever see the dark skies of the Death Guard’s home world again, not after the events at Isstvan. Kaleb’s spirit would have to be content with the esteem of his master.
Garro’s lip curled. ‘Here I am, thinking of spirits, talking to myself in an empty room.’ He shook his head. ‘What is happening to me?’
Next to the cuirass, a bolter lay upon a folded green cloth, and like the armour it too was pristine and unblemished, fresh from the Legion artificers. Garro took off a gauntlet and ran his fingers over the slab-sided breach. The weapon was deep with etchings in High Gothic script, combat honours and battle records listed along the length of it. There were names imprinted here and there, lined in dark emerald ink, each the name of a battle-brother who had carried the gun into war, and perished with it on them. Garro’s weapon had been lost to him on Isstvan Extremis, destroyed by the brutal sonic attack of the Warsinger. Nothing but shattered, brittle metal had been left. This bolter, then, was to be his new sidearm, and it was with bittersweet pride he took it up and held it to parade ready. A new name glittered on the frame: Pyr Rahl. ‘Thank you, brother,’ whispered Garro, ‘I will take a dozen foes with it in your name.’
As was the way of the Astartes, Rahl’s wargear was salvaged and what could remain in use to the XIV Legion did so. In this manner, the Astartes kept the memories of their dead kinsmen alive long after they had perished. Garro’s eyes fell to find a carry-sack made of roughly woven fabric, lying forgotten in the corner of the alcove. He dropped into a crouch and took it up.
Kaleb’s belongings. He sighed. When an Astartes died, there was always a brother ready to gather up the meager possessions he might have left behind and see to them, but there were no provisions for a simple housecarl. Garro felt an unfamiliar kind of sorrow over Kaleb’s passing. It wasn’t the hard fury he had for the death of Rahl or the hundreds of others he had witnessed. Only now that Kaleb was gone, did Garro understand how much he had valued the little man, as a sounding board, as a servant, as a comrade. For a moment the captain considered ditching the sack in the nearest ejector chute and making an end of it, but that would have been ignoble. Instead, with a gentleness belied by his large, heavy hands, Garro traced through Kaleb’s effects: utility blades and armoury tools, some changes of clothing, a trinket made from a bolter shell…
He turned the object between his fingers and held it up to the lamplight. A matrix-etching of the Emperor stared back at him, beneficent and all-knowing. He pocketed the icon in a belt pouch. With it there were dog-eared papers held together by a worn strap. In places they had been taped where they had become ripped. Some of the pages were on different kinds of paper, some handwritten, some from a crude mimeograph with words smudged and blurry from hundreds of reproductions. Garro found sketchy illustrations that made little sense to him, although he could pick out recognizable elements, iconography of the Emperor, of Terra, repeated again and again. ‘Lectitio Divinitatus,’ he read aloud. ‘Is this what you kept from me, Kaleb?’
Garro knew of the sect. They were common people who, despite the constant light of the secular Imperial truth, had come to believe that the Emperor of Mankind was himself a divine being. Who else, they argued, had the right to crush all other belief in gods, than the one true deity himself? Was not the Emperor a singular, god-like entity?
Despite his open rejection of such beliefs, the Emperor instilled such dedication and devotion. Immortal and all-seeing, possessed of the greatest intellect and psychic potential of any living human, in the eyes of the Lectitio Divinitatus, what else could he be but a divinity?
Yes, now Garro saw it, he realized Kaleb’s connection to the Cult of the God-Emperor had been there all along, simmering beneath the surface. A hundred tiny words and deeds suddenly took on new meaning in the light of this discovery. He had decried Grulgor on the gunnery deck for speaking blasphemy against the Emperor, and before in the murk of his healing coma, Garro had heard the invocation from Kaleb’s lips, the entreaty for protection. ‘You are of purpose,’ he intoned flatly, the housecarl’s final words returning once again. ‘The God-Emperor wills it. His hand lies upon all of us. The Emperor… the Emperor protects.’
He knew that it was wrong to go any further, that it went against the letter of the Imperial truth he had dedicated his life to, but still Nathaniel Garro read on, absorbing the words of the tracts, page by tattered page.
Although he would never have showed it openly, the passing hours had shaken him to his core. He had always imagined himself as a blade in the Emperor’s hand, or as an arrow in mankind’s quiver to be nocked and sent tearing into the heart of humanity’s foes, but what was he now? All the blades were blunted and twisted upon one another, the arrows broken about their shafts.
The firm ground Garro’s beliefs stood upon was turning to quicksand beneath them. It was almost too much to contain within his mind! His brothers, his battle lord, his very Warmaster all ranged against him; the blood of a Death Guard on his sword and much more to come; the foreboding pall at the boundary of his thoughts; the omen of the blinded star, the smug prophecy of the dead xenos child and Kaleb’s dying plea.
‘It’s too much!’ Garro shouted, and sank to his knees, the papers tight in his hand. The horrible taint of this knowledge was a poison that threatened to shrivel h
is soul. Never in centuries of service had the Astartes felt himself to be so totally, so utterly vulnerable, and in that moment, he understood there was only one to whom he could reach out.
‘Help me,’ he cried, offering his entreaty to the darkness, ‘I am lost.’ Of their own accord, Garro’s hands found the shape of the aquila, palms open across his chest. ‘Emperor,’ he choked, ‘give me faith.’
Behind his eyes, Garro felt something break loose inside him and leap, a sudden release, a flood of energy. It was beyond his ability to describe it, and there in the gloom of the half-lit alcove, he felt the ghost of a voice brush over the edges of his psyche. A crying woman, pale and elfin, strong and delicate all at once, was calling him: the voice from his dream.
Save us, Nathaniel.
Garro cried out and stumbled backwards, fighting to recover his balance. The words had been so clear and close, it was as if she had been in the chamber with him, standing at his ear. The Death Guard recovered his composure, panting hard, and got back to his feet. He sensed a peculiar, greasy tang in the air, fading even as he noticed it. The stroke upon his thoughts had been like the jorgalli’s intrusion into his mind, but different. It shocked him in its intimacy, and yet it did not feel wrong like the telepathic touch of the alien. Garro took a shuddering breath. As quickly as it had happened, the moment vanished like vapor.
He was still staring at the bundle of pages in his hand when Decius stormed into the chamber, anger tight on the younger man’s face.
SOLUN DECIUS WATCHED his commander stuff a fold of papers into a belt pouch and turn away, as if he wasn’t ready to look the Astartes in the eye. ‘Decius,’ he managed. ‘Report.’
‘Resistance was encountered,’ he growled. ‘I… We dealt with the remainder of Grulgor’s men. They made an attempt to reach the landing bay. We suffered some casualties as they were repelled.’ Decius’s face became a grimace. ‘It was a slaughter.’
Garro eyed him. ‘They would have done the same to us, if we had given them the opportunity. Why else do you think that Typhon placed both Grulgor and me aboard this ship, if not to have my command terminated when the moment came?’
The Flight of the Eisenstein Page 17
