by Paul Kearney
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2: PREDATOR, PREY
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4: THE LAST WALL
5: THRONEWORLD
6: ECHOES OF THE LONG WAR
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ARMAGEDDON
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Legends of the Dark Millennium
ASTRA MILITARUM
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ULTRAMARINES
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A Tau Empire novella
SONS OF CORAX
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Contents
Cover
Backlist
Title Page
Warhammer 40,000
Gloria in Imperator Excelsis
I
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
II
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Epilogue
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Slaughter at Giant’s Coffin’
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
Warhammer 40,000
It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.
Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
Dark star, that hath no light;
Whither shalt thou wander,
If not back into the abyss
Where we must follow?
Prophetic Musings,
By the False Saint Basillius, 321 M.37
Expunged in Heretico, 134 M.38
Accounts of Ultramarines Operation code word Fury suppressed,
By Order of Imperial Inquisition, Ordo Hereticus, 812 M.41
Adeptus Terra Sanctum Noctis in Extremis
Gloria in Imperator Excelsis
I have seen more than two standard centuries of human history go by, and as the years pass, it seems to me it is a hazard of them that one dwells increasingly on the defeats one has known, rather than on the glorious victories.
It is not merely the memory of dead brethren that springs into the mind, though that is part of it. We of the Adeptus Astartes do not mourn our fallen brothers as ordinary men do. Their deaths are a fulfilment of their purpose in life. They were brought into being to destroy the enemies of mankind, and if they die doing that, then their destiny is fulfilled, their fate complete. There is no higher calling in this universe, no better way to make an end. We may miss the wit and wisdom, the steadfast savagery of those who are gone before us into the Emperor’s Peace, but we do not dwell on their loss in the same way that lesser men do. For we know that one day we will follow them on that road into the darkness.
No, it is something else. The victories – they are ours by our own prowess and the divine blessing of the Emperor. And there is a tradition of them, especially for my own Chapter. Especially for those of us who bear the ultima sigil on our shoulders. We have prevailed against terrible odds on battlefields and worlds beyond count. Victory is something we often take for granted.
It is the defeats which gnaw at us – and at myself, if truth be told.
We analyse them, learn from them, put them behind us and carry on, but the foul taste of some remains with us always.
This is not that most sterile of emotions, regret. It is anger. Anger at stupidity and waste, the wanton foolishness of so many of those who inhabit the Imperium of Man.
We have strayed so far from what once might have been, and are now a species that claws for its very existence amid the stars, having fallen from grace. That original sin, that blasphemy, will always be with us. It is the dark shadow we must all live with, and every day it grins out at us from the immaterium, in a battle without end. That is one defeat which will never go away. The memory and the consequences of it are with us always.
Tireless, indomitable, the Adeptus Astartes were created to smash the shadow, to thrust it back into the gibbering abyss from whence it came. We have fought that fight for ten millennia now, and will fight it for ten more if that is what is required of us by our bright Father. But we cannot ignore our past, the failures that are remembered but not spoken of.
When I kneel in prayer before great Guilliman, the light shining around his timeless form, I look upon the very life-blood of my forbear, my great and noble sire – I see the mortal wound that shines ever-fresh in the holy stasis field which sustains his ever-dying flesh.
And I re
member that it was inflicted by one of our own. His own brother primarch, Fulgrim, brought him down.
It is one thing to suffer defeat. It is another to suffer betrayal at the hands of those who were once our own brethren. For such as these, there can be no forgiveness, no end to the quest for vengeance. They are the worst of our enemies, those who turned to the Ruinous Powers and broke down the great edifice of the Imperium of Man.
They were once like us, and that is why our hatred of them is undying.
Deep in our souls, we fear that we carry the same sin within us.
I
Insanista in tenebris
One
‘Primarion Optis, this is Arnaeus three, sweeping grid three-seven-two-five now, my augur is clear, all systems are in holy function. Throne be with us.’
‘Acknowledged Arnaeus three, we have you on long-range and are plotting now. Your patrol route has been inscribed in the Cogitator of Navigation.’
The augur controller Rann Gorekian, a human overseeing a long bank of murmuring servitors, yawned. It was a beautiful morning, and the sun was rising fat and red over Primarion Optis, the only large-scale urban area on all of beautiful Iax. Gorekian’s shift was almost over, and unlike the tireless servitors he oversaw, he was looking forward to his early morning meal, cold water on his face and some sleep. But for now, his duty kept him here, in the long, stone-built chamber that was as austere and echoing as a place of worship.
He bore the ultima sigil on the chest of his blue uniform, surrounded by the stylised wheat ears that made up the symbol of his world. Green garden of the sector, Iax was an agri planet, the granary of Ultramar. Nestled in the heart of that great, guarded realm, it was surrounded by minefields and gun-satellites and was as protected a world as could be found in this embattled galaxy. But still, the inter-system patrols went out every few weeks to police the space-lanes about Iax, a fleet of small ships kept in constant motion and watchfulness by the decree of Macragge.
Call sign Arnaeus three was a tiny craft, by Imperial standards. Based on the hull of a Faustus class interceptor, it was one of several squadrons maintained at Primarion Optis Space Port on Iax. Just over three hundred feet long, it had a crew of four: pilot, observation officer, flight engineer and gunnery mate, as well as several servitors. On this day the Arnaeus was close enough to its home planet to travel with a reduced crew. Its job was to observe, not to engage, and in any case, this far into the heart of Ultramar the system patrols had become over the years something of a pro forma exercise. Everyone knew that an Ultramarines strike cruiser was never more than a day or two away; on this occasion the massive, sacred bulk of the Rex Aeterna, commanded by Captain Caito Galenus himself with a full company of Adeptus Astartes aboard.
Gorekian walked up and down the monitoring dais which arced between the banked servitors and their screens. Incense hung blue in the air; the tech-priests had already conducted their ritual morning blessings, and the cogitators hummed serenely, the spirits within them in harmony.
High above him, the early light of Iax’s star poured through the armoured windows of the command chapel, yellow tinged with blue. He checked his chrono. Thirty minutes until relief. Another uneventful night in Ultramar.
It had been over sixty years since the tyranid invasion of the sector, and the terrible destruction of that titanic conflict had long since been repaired. To Gorekian, who was not yet thirty, tales of those years were something akin to legend. His father had known that time, and disliked speaking of it. Back then, Macragge itself had been all but overwhelmed, the Ultramarines beaten off their own home world, much of the surrounding systems devastated. But though there had been other wars since, they had taken place out on the fringes of the sector. Some were still ongoing; the orks were continually probing the borders of Ultramar, as were the eldar. But to a young man like Rann Gorekian, the possibility of a major threat making it all the way here, to the heart of the Ultramarines’ territory, was so remote as to be unthinkable.
Such are the limitations of men’s memories.
Gorekian yawned again, thinking of his wife in the hab out in the suburbs, the green fields that stretched beyond it. The plains of Iax were given over to grain crops, farmed on an immense scale by semi-automated combine-reticulates, irrigated, verdant, quiet. A man might spend his life on the planet and not see a single tree, just those endless plains of wheat and soy and millet; but the immense sky was always there to wonder at, and at night the stars blazed across it in trails and streamers of all colours, not hemmed out as they were on so many other worlds by the lights of hive cities and the miasma of man-made smogs.
Iax was clean, unpolluted – it had to be, for the foodstuffs it created fed half the subsector, even venerable Macragge itself. A man counted himself lucky to make his life there, when he could be toiling in some lightless mine or sweating his innards out in the manufactoria of a forge world. Iax was blessed, and the prowess of the Ultramarines saw to it that it remained so.
‘Primarion Optis, this is Arnaeus three, we have an anomalous reading in grid three-seven-two-six, coming up on augur now. Some kind of energy bloom. Could be the residual from a warp translation.’
Gorekian rubbed his eyes and touched the vox mic that hung from one ear.
‘I hear you, Arnaeus three. Do you wish to investigate? You are beyond our augur and your sweep is almost over.’ And so is my shift, Gorekian thought irritably.
A few seconds delay. Arnaeus three was moving farther out from the planet, the lengthening distance delaying signal transmission somewhat. Gorekian picked up the ship’s ident beacon on the data readout of the servitor tasked with monitoring the void space over Iax and frowned. Almost out of patrol range.
He knew Arnaeus three’s pilot – young Jesh Warius, a fire-eater if ever there was one. The fellow was a voidsman of some repute among his comrades in the Iax squadrons, one of those who loved nothing more than to pilot his craft out there in the darkness, intent on one day joining the Imperial Navy proper, to course the true depths of the void. But he was trustworthy.
‘Affirmative, Primarion Optis, we are heading to intercept, should be within good interrogative range within fifteen minutes.’
‘I see nothing out there,’ Gorekian said, walking up and down the dais and scanning each slate and screen below him. Nothing was logged as inbound in that grid – if some vessel had translated out of the warp, then it was not on any schedule here, which was unusual for a system as well regulated as Iax.
The servitors muttered in binharic and their barely human limbs moved across their keyboards like musicians playing some enormously intricate instrument. Whatever it was that had piqued Warius’ interest was too far out to show up here.
The Arnaeus’ ident beacon glowed yellow, surrounded by darkness – no other Imperial ships were anywhere near. Gorekian’s stomach rumbled. Silently he cursed Warius and his curiosity. Like as not it would be nothing, some spatial anomaly which would go into the log and be forgotten along with the fistful of others that cropped up every few months. The void was full of phenomena that had not been investigated or explained; they were merely catalogued. Scientific curiosity was for the Adeptus Mechanicus, not a planetary patrol crew.
Minutes clicked by. Gorekian’s relief would soon be here. He could hand over Warius and his curiosity to Lieutenant Haldane, or he could adhere to the letter of the regulation tomes and remain.
Gorekian sighed. He knew what he would do. The training had ingrained it in him.
‘Primarion Optis, Arnaeus three here – you are not going to believe what I’m picking up!’ Warius’ voice had lost the bored competence he usually affected. ‘Throne – I’ve never seen anything like this before!’
‘Maintain proper voice procedure,’ Gorekian warned, though he felt a shrill spike of adrenaline at the outright fear in the pilot’s tone. ‘Arnaeus three, relay your findings to me at once.’
Th
ere was a squawk of static, and then silence.
‘Arnaeus three, do you read? Acknowledge my last message and relay your augur readings to my cogitators for analysis.’
‘It’s drawing us in– we’re out of–’ The transmission cut off on Warius’ last shout.
Nothing more. Gorekian strode up and down, his weariness forgotten. The servitors muttered binharic around him like a congregation mumbling its prayers. He stared up at the tall, cool walls of the chapel.
‘Throne,’ he growled under his breath at last. He touched his vox and called up the servitors direct.
‘Sigma binary one, extend planetary augur to full reach, bearing towards grid three-seven-two-six. Binary two, re-establish vox with Arnaeus patrol.’ He hesitated, and bared his teeth a second. ‘Sigma three, ready emergency vox call for Rex Aeterna strike cruiser, Captain Galenus commanding.’ His heart began to thump in his chest. ‘But hold off on that until I give the word.’ It was written in the Regulation tomes that all unusual vox occurrences be routed out to the nearest Ultramarines strike cruiser for further analysis, but he did not want to go down that route yet. One did not disturb the Ultramarines with trivialities.
Gorekian began to sweat. The servitors went about their business with the calm imperturbability of their kind, the readiness lights on their decks glowing amber as they undertook their newly assigned tasks in addition to their continual monitoring of the space port systems.
The command centre doors slid open and Lieutenant Haldane walked in, an older, crumpled man who looked as though he had just got out of bed. But he was a veteran of his kind, and took in the situation on the boards at a glance. Making the sign of the aquila to the little Imperial Shrine, which glimmered with a votive light, he placed his vox headset behind one ear and raised an eyebrow at his fellow officer, but Gorekian held up a hand. ‘I have this, Borr.’
‘Warius again, eh?’ Haldane said, scanning the call-logs.
‘It’s probably nothing.’ But Gorekian could not forget the fear in Arnaeus three’s last transmission.
