The Path of Heaven

by Chris Wraight

  The Proudheart’s main line deployment was joined, seconds later, by the arrival of Jewel Shard, Lepidan and three other battle-groups tied to the lord commander’s will – four full line warships, many more support vessels, from hunter-destroyers to gun frigates, the kind of flotilla that would have once subjugated whole sectors, now running down those of the species who had refused the call to evolution.

  Eidolon felt his new glands twitch. He raised a finger and traced the line of his swollen throat, the skin as tight as a drum. He felt the veins pulse rhythmically, tracing out the irregular pattern of two hearts.

  Menials brought new armour-pieces to be drilled and turbo-hammered into place. A six-legged augmetic drone clattered across the marble, bearing Eidolon’s swollen gorget in three iron pincer-claws. The armour-piece had been chased with silver, picked out with bestiary from Old Terra and Chemos, fluted finely, polished to the high sheen that had always been demanded. As the drone approached, Eidolon raised his chin, suffering its mechanical attentions like some old coiffured monarch. The gorget was clamped into place, and Eidolon felt filament-needles slide into his distorted black carapace, locking fast and pulling ceramite hard onto flesh.

  As the sonic multipliers made their interface, an echoing snap spun out across the arming chamber. It was only a feedback glitch, but it still blasted open the cranial shells of the servitors, leaving several twitching helplessly on the flags.

  Eidolon turned to the tech-priests, raising an eyebrow. The closest of them, a hunched nightmare of cabling and wire-mesh cowls, bowed in apology. ‘Refinements are still being made,’ it muttered.

  Eidolon raised his arms to the horizontal, and the surviving menials shuffled forwards to clamp the plates into position. Every addition brought a surge of fresh pain – a toxic blend of his gene-template being twisted into new and unsanctioned forms. Some of it he had learned to enjoy. Other sensations were less welcome, but in time he would no doubt find a way to turn the experience to his advantage.

  We are not the finished article yet, he thought. There are still steps of sensation left to take.

  A rune flickered into life over his helm display, indicating the arrival of Azael Konenos and his ships. Eidolon remembered the same marker lighting up before Isstvan, when Konenos was not yet an orchestrator of the Kakophoni and he himself had only experienced one lifetime. Azael’s loyalty had been complete and perfect then, just as it was now.

  ‘Be welcome, my brother,’ Eidolon voxed. All around him, the drills whined as the bolts were dragged tight.

  ‘Lord commander,’ acknowledged Konenos, his voice also distorted by the augmetics of his own ruined throat. ‘The barbarians?’

  ‘They will come. My equerry doubts it, but they will come.’ Out of the corner of his eye, through the crystalflex real-viewers, Eidolon caught sight of the Ravisher at the head of the newly translated formation. The hunters were gathering. ‘Take up position beyond the Gate’s leeward rim. Run silent, and wait for the charge. Have you witnessed Kalium before, my brother?’

  ‘I have not.’

  Tech-priests limped towards Eidolon, carrying his helm aloft on a salver of gold. It was twice the size it had once been, chocked and studded with auditory dampeners and channellers, inlaid with the filaments that would slide into his inner ear and wrap around his sinus cavities. They lifted it high, and Eidolon looked up into its miraculous interior.

  ‘Then you are fortunate,’ he said, just as the rim of the helm came down, sealing him within the carapace of ceramite. Fresh shards of pain burned as more wires slithered into bone-sockets. ‘As we destroy what we once built, there are fewer wonders than there were. Feast on this one, and as we slaughter in its shadow, remember what we, the children of Terra, once dreamed to accomplish.’

  No one knew who had made it. All records were gone, lost in the long strife that had engulfed the galaxy before the Emperor’s coming. It was ancient – that at least was certain – raised in a time when the technology of humanity had run amok, designed by those who had no fear of the blasphemous union of mind and metal. Perhaps that had been its undoing – those who had placed it into the gulf of the void succumbing to the machine-spirits sacrilegiously burned into its arcane core.

  The date of its abandonment would never be known. The Gate had lain dormant and charred for at least a thousand years before the explorator fleet of Rogue Trader Josiah Halliard had come across it while roving far ahead of the First Legion’s obsidian war fleets. Halliard had searched it with his own forces, believing the structure to contain treasure worth plundering, but found only echoes and rust amid the dark. Frustrated, he had later sent missives to the Lion’s command, which in turn had brought the Dark Angels to Kalium. They had claimed the entire subsector for Terra, sealing it off and sending in reclamator squads of their own. What they discovered was never made known, though records of transits from Kalium to Caliban were logged deep in the Navis Nobilite’s archives on Terra, none of which carried official authorisation and all of which were buried.

  In time, the Lion himself had arrived, fresh from conquest on a dozen worlds. It was said that when his grey-eyed gaze alighted on the Gate for the first time, he did not speak. It had been as if he could peer beyond its bulk, past the great curve of its inner mouth, and see into the maw beyond. When he had eventually stirred, the words had been typically few.

  ‘Make this place fast. It guards many paths.’

  Perhaps he had sensed what the Navigator Houses only later proved, or maybe he had just been fortunate in his guesswork. Either way, the Lion’s judgement was sound. The Kalium System lay at the juncture of nine major routes through the warp. Great currents of pure aether surged about it, pushed by the vagaries of the Tempest Invisible. A fleet could enter the aperture into those deep streams and be thrown far across the galaxy’s plane at greatly accelerated speeds. A journey of Terran months might take a similar span of weeks, something that was of great interest to the strategos of the Administratum as they planned the ever-expanding warfront of the Great Crusade. In this the Gate was not alone, for other such portals and cut-ways had been found in scattered wastes among the stars, but it was stable and within the Crusade’s core expansion sphere, and thus of principal value.

  So it was that the First Legion did not retain ownership of the Kalium Gate, but it passed instead to the direct control of the naval echelons of the Imperial Army. More fleets arrived, first by established warp lanes, then using the arteries under the Gate itself. The old structures were secured and charted, and then built upon. Ancient bulwarks disappeared under new mountains of adamantium and iron. Strange harmonic vanes were replaced with batteries of macrocannons and void-lances. Shafts of unknown provenance were filled in with lead-lined cells, ready to take the thousands of menials who would soon be shipped in from surrounding compliant worlds. Mechanicum crawler-teams turned up and promptly disappeared into the depths of the core, emerging months later laden with locked caskets ready for unscheduled and undocumented return voyages back to Mars.

  By the Crusade’s high point, a hundred battleships were passing through the Gate every week, guided by fifty thousand naval staff installed within the new refit yards and fortresses and sensor-towers and docking berths. An artificial world grew like coral over the old foundations, obliterating the signs of an older civilisation, until only a few archivists and sector commanders ever knew that the mighty staging post had once been a creation of humanity’s era of semi-remembered terror and hubris.

  And yet, all knew, deep down, that the place could not have been made in any other epoch. Its size defied description – a colossal ellipse running around the neck of the warp inlet, nine hundred kilometres in diameter at its widest extent. From a distance, it resembled a glittering necklace in space, at once fragile and indomitable. Coming closer, an observer would see that the Necklace – as it had become known – was composed of hundreds of node-stations, each one linked to the next
by heavy lengths of reinforced chain. Every one of those stations would have been a formidable star fortress in its own right, bristling with defensive weaponry and crowned with assault craft docks. All of them, though, were dwarfed by the pinnacle of the Gate’s mysterious architecture: the Keystone.

  The Lion had given it the name. At the apex of the great curve of the Gate’s collar, the Keystone swelled out into the abyss, bulbous, bloated, superabundant. It had taken two years to chart the full extent of its labyrinthine interior, and even after the Army had assumed final command, large sections of it remained effectively mothballed and unknown. The docks were capacious enough to accommodate a star fort and its escort fleet, and the towers that clustered at its crown were the equal of any hive world’s spires. Huge protective arcs surrounded it, enclosing inhabited sections within concentric rings of cannon-laced adamantium. Its shield generators utilised archaeotech far more efficient than standard Imperial void shield capability, giving the entire edifice a permanent cloak of translucent silver.

  They had said that the Keystone was unbreakable. They had said that even a Legion fleet would be unable to penetrate that degree of shielding, and that, if supplied and manned and in prime condition, the Kalium Gate could be held indefinitely against any besieging force known to Imperial high command.

  Perhaps some rumour of that boast reached the ear of the Lord of Iron, called Perturabo, master of the IV Legion, and perhaps that wore at his ever-fragile pride. When treachery came to the Imperium, right at its apogee, it was his Legion that took command of the Kalium subsector warfront. In those earliest months of confusion, rumour and counter-rumour, little was known, or could be known, of the movements of those primarchs who had cast their lot with the Warmaster, and so the Gate’s defenders might reasonably have believed themselves as secure as any. In advance of firm orders from Terra, preparations were made, drills were run, the resident fleet cordon reinforced.

  It was afterwards said that Perturabo took little pleasure in its swift and complete destruction.

  ‘I desire the fall of only one fortress,’ he was reported to have remarked, even as the outer Necklace still burned from the Iron Blood’s punishing fusillades. ‘Until then, count no victories.’

  When the IV Legion took to the void once more, they left the Gate a smouldering tomb, spinning gently on its enormous axis, stripped of life and rendered back almost to the dormant state it had been in when discovered by Halliard.

  And yet, in all the tumult of a galaxy in flames, the Kalium Gate’s destruction was just another statistic among a thousand other catastrophes. Amid the riot of intelligence and counter-intelligence, much was missed, and more ignored. Though the supply fleets stopped coming, and access to the great warp lanes was blocked by mines and the wreckage of the inner collar, few in the outer reaches of the galaxy would have known of its fall unless their fight for survival had demanded it.

  And so it remained a prize for the unwary, a nexus that now led nowhere, a ruin whose possession gained the victor nothing.

  But that had not stopped them coming. Even as the warships of the Emperor’s Children took up guard positions over the summit of the dormant Keystone apex, new warp signatures registered out in the far void – dozens of them, moving fast, just as those of Jaghatai’s Legion always did.

  Three

  Shiban reached the blast doors to the bridge, crouched low and waved Yiman forwards. His battle-brother sprinted ahead, clamped three krak grenades to the hair-line between the door’s adamantium plates and set them to blow in sequence. Yiman retreated as the rest of the arban fell back, taking cover behind a line of low support frames five metres from the clicking charges.

  Explosions kicked out, shattering the doors’ locking mechanism and denting the heavy plates inwards. Shiban moved instantly, clutching his guan dao two-handed, but he was not the fastest – Jochi, Yiman and two others beat him to it, revelling in pure genhanced muscle rather than the hybrid mechanisms their khan now employed.

  ‘For the Khagan!’ Jochi whooped as he smashed his way through the jagged-edged gap, firing his bolt pistol.

  Shards spun and bounced as Shiban followed him in. Beyond the portal, the bridge opened up in a fog of flickering lumen-strips. It ran for a hundred metres, rising slightly towards a crystalflex observation dome at the far end. Deep pits fell away on either side, crammed with terrified mortals and chittering servitors. Projectile fire skipped from the gantries that spanned the drop, aimed poorly by nervous hands. The bulk carrier’s defenders were not even of the calibre of regular Imperial Army troopers – if Shiban had not been encased in his superlative armour he would still have had little to fear from such ill-directed shots.

  By now, Jochi was nearing the observation platform. Shiban followed close on his heels, feeling the metal decking flex under his weight.

  ‘Preserve the shipmaster,’ he voxed.

  Bolt-round echoes rang across the arch-roofed interior. Two warriors had leapt down into the pits and were slashing through the hordes with their curved blades. Two more had vaulted up into the heights, defying the weight of their armour to clamber into the metal spars that sheltered the snipers. Cogitator lenses shattered, throwing fizzing sheaves of crystal over the decking. The air rang with the stink of cordite, human fear and burst lubricant cables.

  Shiban reached the platform under the dome. Twenty-three corpses greeted him, each one felled by a single precision shot. Jochi stood guard over the slumped cadavers, his armour barely dented, scanning around for anything still living. Others of the arban fanned out, still hunting, thirsting for more blood to wet their blades.

  Two crew members had been spared. The mortal shipmaster, a woman, was on her knees, trembling. Her Navigator stood beside her, unafraid.

  Shiban stooped, lifting the shipmaster’s fleshy chin with a single finger. ‘Where are you bound?’ he asked.

  ‘The Narrows,’ she blurted, eyes wide. ‘My lord.’

  ‘I am not your lord. What is your cargo?’

  ‘We did not–’

  ‘What is your cargo?’

  The woman looked briefly lost, her pupils flickering from the armoured giant towering over her to the other ones who rampaged across her bridge. ‘I... We do not–’

  Shiban let her chin fall, and turned to the Navigator, who bowed floridly.

  ‘A privilege to witness you fight, khan,’ he said. ‘My name is Cavelli. We carry nutrient supplies, battle-grade rations for nine Army regiments in service of the Third Legion. Some infantry weapons – ground attack craft, heavy assault gear. The remainder from standard supply ledgers, medicae equipment, parts, machine tools. Little of great import. In truth, I am surprised you came for it.’

  Shiban studied the old man. The Navigator would be allowed to live, for such rarities were never killed needlessly. It sickened him, for the agents of the Navis Nobilite were employed by both sides of the war, untouchable even in treachery, their lives protected both by ancient precedent and the practical necessity of warp travel. The convoy would have two-score of such mutants on duty, at least one for each bulk carrier, and all would be preserved. Perhaps many of them had already served the Loyalist cause before; perhaps none had.

  ‘How soon before you power your engines to full?’ Shiban asked.

  Cavelli tilted his head in what might have been apology. ‘As I was telling Shipmaster Kulba, it will be some time until all ships are prepared.’

  ‘You have one hour. Get to work. And I will have additional requirements.’

  Cavelli bowed again, then stiffened suddenly. ‘Of course, we may not have that long.’

  Even as he spoke, Shiban received the same data over his comm-feed. He switched to the wide-range tactical augurs and picked up idents from all the units fighting in the battlesphere. Every bulk carrier had been boarded and every enemy crew had been immobilised. The last of the defence pickets were being run down, and the two
White Scars frigates had pulled in close to the void-wake of the convoy to receive the fighters again.

  But that was not all. Warp signatures had registered on the edge of sensor range – a dozen of them, coming in tight, skirting the very edge of safe Mandeville tolerance.

  Jochi stomped back across the command platform. ‘They are here?’

  Shiban nodded, trying to gauge how long they had, what numbers were incoming, how best to marshal the forces given to him. The margins were getting tighter, the response times faster, the windows for operation slimmer.

  ‘This is still my ship...’ came Kulba’s tremulous voice.

  Shiban turned to see the shipmaster standing defiantly, her chin wobbling a little, a bead of sweat running down her cheek. She had not drawn a weapon, but her fists were balled in her gloves, and she had placed herself between Shiban and the command throne.

  There was something noble in that. From the earliest days on Chogoris, when Shiban had been Tamu and the boundary of his existence had been the sky and the earth beneath it, he had always admired defiance.

  His bolt-round hit her in the chest before she had even seen him draw the weapon. Kulba hit the back of the throne with a wet thud and sprawled across its arms, by which time Shiban was already moving, sliding his bolter back into its lock-position, ignoring the slick of blood that spread from the throne’s base.

  ‘Secure the Navigators,’ he ordered, switching to the arban’s channel. ‘And look to the engines, as ordered.’

  A crackling comm-burst brought in more information – Emperor’s Children war vessels, as precisely configured as they had ever been, in numbers. So this encounter would be the test Yesugei had promised him it would be.

  ‘Then make them fight,’ he commanded, knowing that every warrior in the brotherhood was primed and ready. ‘Blood them deep, for they are the oath-breakers, the destroyers of the dream.’