Decius wanted to snap out the angry reply boiling in his thoughts, to say that maybe that was true, but perhaps it was only Garro who had been on the target list. He stared angrily at the deck. What exasperated him more than anything was that he had not been given the choice! His fate was tied to the battle-captain’s now, whatever happened. Yes, perhaps this might have been what Decius would have chosen had he been given the opportunity, but the sheer fact he had not made him rebel against it!
His mentor read the emotion on his face. ‘Speak plainly, lad.’
‘What would you have me say?’ Decius retorted hotly.
‘The truth. If not here and now, then you may never get another chance,’ Garro replied, keeping his tone level. ‘I would have you speak your mind, Solum.’
There was a long pause as Decius worked to frame his resentment. ‘I put down three men wearing my own colours back there,’ he said, jerking his head at the corridor and the ship beyond, ‘not xenos or mutants, but Death Guard, my brother Astartes!’
‘Those men ceased to be our brethren the instant they chose Horus’s path over the Emperor’s.’ Garro sighed. ‘I share the pain of this, Solun, more than you can know, but they have become traitors—’
‘Traitors?’ The curse exploded from him. ‘Who are you to decide that, Battle-Captain Garro? What authority do you have to make such a determination, sir? You are not Warmaster, not a primarch, not even a first captain! Yet you make this choice for all of us!’ Garro watched without responding. Decius knew that daring to take such a tone with a senior officer was worth punishment and censure, but still he raged on. ‘What… what if it is we who are the traitors, captain? Horus will no doubt paint us as such when he learns of what you have done.’
‘You have seen what I have seen,’ said his commander evenly. ‘Tarvitz, Grulgor, the kill orders from Eidolon and Typhon… If there is an explanation that would undo all of that, that would make this all go away, I would give much to know it.’
Decius advanced a step. ‘There is something you fail to consider. Ask yourself this, my lord: What if Horus is right?’
He had barely uttered the question when the combat alert sirens began to wail.
‘SAY THAT AGAIN!’ snapped Temeter, pulling the Astartes holding the long-range vox towards him.
With the constant drumming of shellfire back and forth between the Death Guard assault force and the Isstvanian defenders, it was difficult to hear the man’s words. Another blistering salvo of vulcan bolter fire from the Dies Irae roared over their heads, blotting out everything else as the Titan continued its slow advance.
‘Lord, I have fragmentary signals! I can’t make head nor tail of them!’
‘Just give me what you have,’ Temeter said, crouching down behind a broken ferrocrete emplacement, ignoring the whine of needler rounds and the snap-crack of crimson laser beams.
‘Still nothing from the orbital elements,’ continued the Death Guard, ‘I caught an intercept to the Sons of Horus, Squad Lachost, from Lucius of the Emperor’s Children.’
‘Lucius? What did he say?’
‘It was very garbled, sir, but I distinctly heard the words “bio-weapon”.’
Temeter’s eyes narrowed. ‘Are you certain? There was nothing in the mission briefing to indicate the Isstvanians have that capability. This is their holy city, after all. Why would they deploy something like that—’
Temeter suddenly broke off and looked up. The overlapping sounds of the battle had become background noise to him, a constant rush of shot and shell, but suddenly something had changed.
It was the Titan. The Dies Irae was only a few hundred metres from where Temeter crouched, and he had quickly become accustomed to the ground-shaking impacts it made with every footfall, anticipating the rhythm of them, but the massive humanoid machine had stilled and now it stood there, a vast iron citadel, joints hissing and ticking. Mortar shells arced past them and impacted harmlessly on Dies Irae’s torso hull, drawing no reaction from the crew. The Titan’s mighty guns were still pointed directly at the enemy lines, but they were silent.
‘What in Terra’s name is that fool up to?’ Temeter snarled. ‘Raise the Titan! Get Princeps Turnet on the vox and have him explain himself!’
The captain of the Fourth Company scanned the hull of the machine with his optics. There was no visible damage of such scale that would cause a Titan to shut down, no possible reason that Temeter could see for it to just stop. His line of sight passed over the access hatches in the hull and he saw all of them were shut fast. Temeter searched for and found power shaft vents in the thigh armour of the mechanism. Normally they would be puffing with the release of spent coolant gasses, but instead they were sealed. Chill knives of apprehension stabbed into him.
‘I can’t raise the Dies Irae,’ said the other man. ‘Why don’t they answer? They must be able to hear us!’
‘A bio-weapon.’ Temeter reached up and checked the seals at his neck, a creeping sensation of trepidation coming over him. The captain’s head tipped back, his gaze moving to take in the yellowish sky over the Titan’s huge iron shoulders. He saw twinkling glitters up there, streaks cutting through the upper atmosphere with trails of white vapour behind them. The sight shocked him into action. ‘Squad-wide comms, now!’ he shouted. ‘All Death Guard disengage and seek cover! Bio-war alert! Make for the bunker complex to the west.’
The other Astartes relayed his orders into the vox even as he and Temeter broke from their meagre cover.
Temeter saw the dreadnought Huron-Fal turning in place. ‘Ullis Temeter!’ The venerable warrior’s synthetic machine-voder was loud and scratchy. ‘Who has done this?’
‘No time, old friend,’ he said on the run. ‘Just get the men inside, now!’ With every pounding step he took, a part of Temeter’s mind was reeling with the import of what was taking place. The bombs were falling, and there was only one person who could have sent them.
GARRO AND DECIUS made it up the ramp to the windowed gallery overlooking the barracks chamber in time to witness the ships of the Warmaster’s fleet open fire on Isstvan III. A myriad of silver streaks, almost too fast to see with the naked eye, streamed over and around the Eisenstein and the other smaller ships at low anchor above the Choral City. Although they were just blurs, Garro didn’t need to see them clearly to know what they were: Atlas-class heavy warheads converted for space-to-surface functions, servitor-guided missile bombs and multiple impact penetrator munitions. It seemed as if only Eisenstein’s guns remained silent, as if every capital ship in the 63rd Fleet were taking some part in the brutality. The bombs came in a solid rain of murder, falling fast, turning and converging towards pre-designated target points all across the planet. From this terrible god’s-eye view of the onslaught, the distant grey-white patch upon the main continent that was the Choral City was easily visible.
Garro watched in abject horror as the instruments of Horus’s betrayal flared red as they punched through the atmosphere and fell upon his battle-brothers. At his side, Decius’s face was rapt with a peculiar, grotesque fascination as he struggled to comprehend the magnitude of the destruction.
TEMETER AND HURON-FAL were at the shallow ridge before the bunker’s steel hatch, shouting at their kinsmen to run and run, to run and not look back. Temeter felt a pang of fear, not for himself, but for his men. They had responded perfectly to his command, falling back in good order and surging away from the enemy along the trench lines they had already cleared. Hundreds of them were already in the bunkers, sealing themselves in to weather the imminent bombardment, but there were many more he knew would not live to make it to the doors. He looked up again at the sickly sky and Temeter became torn inside. Who betrayed us, he asked himself, echoing the aged dreadnought’s question? Why, in Terra’s name, why?
‘Ullis!’ barked the old warrior, stomping to his side. ‘Get in there! We have only a few seconds!’
‘No!’ he retorted. ‘My men first!’
‘Idiot!’ growled Huron-Fa
l, throwing protocol to the wind. ‘I will stay! Nothing will be able to crack my hide. You go, now!’ He shoved Temeter with his colossal manipulator claw. ‘Go inside, damn you!’
Ullis Temeter stumbled back a step, but his gaze was still on the sky. ‘No,’ he said, just as flickers of brilliant light turned the day a glittering white.
At high altitudes overhead, the first wave of the virus warheads detonated in series, a wall of airbursts instantly unleashing a black rain of destruction. The viral clades, capable of hyper-fast mutational change and near-exponential growth rates, feasted on native airborne bacteria. The thin, dark bloom of the death cloud rolled out over the Choral City, just as the second wave fell. The shells did not explode until they hit the ground, bursting to smother city districts, open fields and trench lines with tides of destructive haze.
The Life-Eater did as it had been engineered to do. Where a molecule of it touched an organic form, it spread instant, putrefying death. The Choral City, every living thing, every human, animal, plant, every organism down to the level of microbes was torn apart by the virus. It leapt boundaries of species in a second, burning out the life of the planet. Flesh rotted and blood became ooze. Bones shredded and turned brittle. Isstvanians and Astartes alike died screaming, united in death by the unstoppable germs.
Temeter saw the warriors running towards him, dying on their feet. Figures fell to the mud as their corpses turned to a red broth of fleshy slurry, viscous fluids seeping from the chinks in their power armour. He knew that he had dallied too long, and he shouted with all his might. ‘Close the hatch. Close it!’ The men in the bunker did as he told them, even as he tasted blood in his mouth and felt his skin prickling with budding lesions. The metal door slammed shut and hissed with a pressure seal, locking him out. Temeter hoped they had been quick enough. With luck, they would not have taken any of the virus inside with them. He managed two stumbling steps before he fell, the muscles in his legs singing with agony.
Huron-Fal caught him. ‘I told you to ran, you fool.’
The captain flung off his helmet with a final, agonised gesture of defiance. It was useless now, the virus having moved effortlessly through the breather grille and into his lungs. His hand flailed at the metal flank of the dreadnought and traced a runnel of dark fluid. Even through the pain, Temeter understood. There was a small fracture in the old warrior’s ceramite casing, not enough to have slowed him on the battlefield, but more than the virus needed to reach inside the dreadnought’s hull and savage the remnants of flesh inside. ‘You… lied.’
‘Veteran’s prerogative,’ came the reply. ‘We’ll go together then, shall we?’ Huron-Fal asked, embracing Temeter’s body to him, moving swiftly away from the bunker.
It took every last effort from Temeter to nod. Blinded now, he could feel the tissues of his eyes burning and shrivelling in his head, the soft meat of his lips and tongue dissolving.
Huron-Fal’s systems were on the verge of shutdown as he stumbled to a safe distance, skidding to a halt. ‘This death,’ rasped the voder, ‘this death is ours. We choose it. We deny you your victory.’
With a single burning nerve impulse, the mind of the warrior at the heart of the dreadnought uncoupled the governor controls on his compact fusion generator and let it overload. For a moment there was a tiny star on the battered plains outside the Choral City, marking two more lives lost within a maelstrom of murder.
GARRO TURNED AWAY from the blossom of darkness across the dying world and glared at his protégé. ‘Now do you believe it? With a planet scoured of life before your eyes, do you have proof enough of this madness?’
Decius spoke in an awed whisper. ‘It… it is incredible. The power of such destruction…’
Garro felt unsteady and held out a hand, placing it on the thick armourglass of the gallery window. ‘It is not over yet. There is one more strike to come before this killing is complete.’
‘But the virus, it is consuming the whole planet… all life, everywhere! What other devastation can the Warmaster turn upon it?’
Garro’s words were weary and hollow. ‘With so many dead, so fast, the Life-Eater burns out quickly, but the mass of corpses it leaves behind moulder and rot.’ His face soured. ‘The… remains turn to gaseous putrefaction and decay. Imagine it, Solun, a whole world turned into a gigantic charnel house, the very atmosphere stinking and choked with the stench of new death.’
Out in the fleet, the ships were shifting, the formation parting so that a single vessel could move into a pre-determined firing position. It was the Warmaster’s flagship, the bright sword-blade shape of the Vengeful Spirit.
‘Of course,’ Garro said bitterly, ‘Horus. He comes to make the killing shot himself. I should have expected no less.’ Garro wanted to close his eyes, to look away, but everywhere he turned his gaze he was haunted by the faces of the men that he had left alone down there. He saw Temeter and Tarvitz, imagined them dying in the onslaught, hoping, even praying that they might have survived the first wave. ‘Now they must survive the final blow.’
The Vengeful Spirit drifted to a halt and turned with stately menace to point her bow down at Isstvan III. In the silence, there was a flicker of light from the maws of the warship’s twin lance cannons along the flanks of the hull. The bolts of blinding fire touched the atmospheric envelope of the planet and a new colour bloomed among the blackened clouds: the searing orange of a firestorm.
‘A match to tinder,’ breathed Decius. ‘The fumes from the decayed dead are lit. The flames will burn across the world.’
‘All by the hand of Horus,’ said Garro, fighting off the sickness in his heart.
They stood there for what seemed like hours, watching the fires cross continents and raze cities as the Warmaster’s flagship orbited above it all, the lone arbiter of Isstvan III’s destruction. Time fell away as the two Astartes stood witness to the distant slaughter.
At last, a loud chime sounded through the chamber over the frigate’s inter-craft vox net and shattered the silence. ‘Captain Garro to the bridge.’ It was Carya’s voice, low and toneless. ‘We have a problem.’
Nathaniel finally turned from the windows and walked away. Decius remained a few moments, his eyes glittering, before he followed suit, running to keep up with his commander.
BARYK CARYA COULDN’T bring himself to look out of the bridge’s forward viewports. The slow death of the planet below was abhorrent to him, a brutal act that went against every fibre of his being. He had not taken an oath of fealty to be part of such horror. He scanned the chamber and found Maas glaring at him from the vox alcove, still gripping the message slip the shipmaster had given him. He advanced towards the junior officer, working to maintain his outward mask of authority. ‘Is it done?’ he demanded.
‘I…’ Maas grimaced. ‘I have sent the signal you ordered me to send, sir.’
The young man’s displeasure was clear on his face, although Carya could have cared less for his unwillingness to broadcast what was an outright lie. The master snatched the paper from his grip and shredded it between his fingers. The message had gone to Terminus Est with Grulgor’s command rune carefully forged by Vought. In terse phrases that he hoped would emulate the speech of an Astartes, Carya had informed First Captain Typhon that Eisenstein had suffered a weapons malfunction that prevented it firing on Isstvan III. It was a poor ruse, as thin as the paper he had scribbled it on, but it would buy them time.
‘What you have done will cost you your rank,’ hissed Maas in a sullen voice. ‘You are upon the verge of open mutiny against the Warmaster’s command!’
‘Get your terms straight, boy,’ retorted Carya. ‘Mutiny is when the enlisted men take over a vessel. When the ship’s master does it, it’s called barratry.’
‘Whatever name you give it, it is wrong!’
‘Wrong?’ Carya’s anger went white-hot in an instant, and he grabbed Maas by the scruff of the neck, dragging him from the alcove and across the bridge. ‘Do you want to see wrong, boy? Look at th
at!’ He forced the vox officer’s face towards the viewports and the distant carnage. He gave him a half-hearted shove. ‘Get back to your damn station, and keep your thoughts to yourself!’
Vought came to his side. ‘Sir, your pardon? The other ship, I have confirmed it. It’s on an approach vector at full military thrust.’
‘Within gun range?’
She nodded. ‘I’ve taken the liberty of getting a firing solution, although that earlier trick won’t work this time. If we kill it, the whole fleet will see.’
The bridge hatch irised open and the commander of the Seventh Company entered with one of his men, his eyes hollow. ‘Shipmaster,’ said Garro gravely, ‘is there a matter of urgency?’
He nodded. ‘There is. Racel, show him.’
Vought manipulated the controls on the hololith to display a close-range globe of space around the frigate. A red arrowhead was moving steadily towards the vessel. ‘Another Thunderhawk,’ she explained, ‘on an intercept vector.’
‘Tarvitz?’ asked the other Astartes, the one called Decius. ‘Has he been in orbit all this time, or returned from the surface?’
Racel shook her head. ‘No, this ship’s ident codes are different. The designation is Nine Delta. It belongs to the Sons of Horus, assigned aboard the Vengeful Spirit.’
‘He knows,’ said the vox officer. ‘Horus knows what happened here. He’s coming to—’
‘Shut up, Maas!’ snapped Carya.
‘He could be right,’ said Decius.
Garro ignored the hololith and went to the viewport, searching for the transport with his own eyes. After a moment he pointed. ‘There, I see it.’
‘Captain, what are your orders?’ The shipmaster shifted uncomfortably, perturbed by the strange sensation of events repeating themselves. This was how it had all begun, with a lone Thunderhawk, with Tarvitz and his warning.
The Flight of the Eisenstein Page 18
