by Paul Kearney
Backlist
More Warhammer 40,000 stories from Black Library
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1: I AM SLAUGHTER
2: PREDATOR, PREY
3: THE EMPEROR EXPECTS
4: THE LAST WALL
5: THRONEWORLD
6: ECHOES OF THE LONG WAR
7: THE HUNT FOR VULKAN
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WAR OF THE FANG
A Space Marine Battles book, containing the novella The Hunt for Magnus and the novel Battle of the Fang
THE WORLD ENGINE
An Astral Knights novel
DAMNOS
An Ultramarines collection
DAMOCLES
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OVERFIEND
Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Salamanders novellas Stormseer, Shadow Captain and Forge Master
ARMAGEDDON
Contains the Black Templars novel Helsreach and novella Blood and Fire
Legends of the Dark Millennium
SHAS’O
A Tau Empire collection
ASTRA MILITARUM
An Astra Militarum collection
ULTRAMARINES
An Ultramarines collection
FARSIGHT
A Tau Empire novella
SONS OF CORAX
A Raven Guard collection
SPACE WOLVES
A Space Wolves collection
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Contents
Cover
Backlist
Title Page
Warhammer 40,000
Illustrations
Prologue
I – The Frontier
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
II – The Siege
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
III – The Gatekeeper of Zalathras
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Epilogue
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Ultramarines’
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.
Prologue
It is more than fifty years since we hurled the tyranid swarm from Ultramar, and still we bear the marks of that great conflict, like wounds not yet healed that run through the very marrow of the Chapter. My beloved First Company is a mere relic of what it was before Hive Fleet Behemoth spewed its filth upon Macragge. It will be decades, centuries perhaps, before it is whole again.
Fifty years. They go past so quickly now. There have been other wars since, but none to match the squalid hell that we knew upon our own home world. There I, too, would have died, upon Cold Steel Ridge – were it not for the sacrifice of my honour guard.
I pray for those lost heroes every day as the sun rises, for I am here and they are not. They made that choice, and I am eternally in their debt because of it.
The glorious dead. They go to the Emperor’s Peace, and if they are blessed then their gene-seed is retrieved, and something of their flesh rises to fight again. And so it goes, and has done for thousands of years. This is how our universe works. We are bound in service for all eternity. We serve mankind.
Suscipiat Imperator sacrificium nostrum.
May our sacrifice be worthy of the Emperor.
Mortal weariness does not often rise within me, not in the flesh and bone that my divine father graced me with. But there is at times a weariness that creeps into my mind, like the last shade of the dusk before the fall of night. I know not from whence it comes, unless it be some insidious lurking taint of the immaterium, Throne forbid.
I expunge it, eradicate it, burn it from my mind. In prayer, in battle, my faith in my Redeemer liveth. The Throne of the eternal Emperor sustains me.
I have spoken to no one else of this, not my most trusted battle-brethren, not even the silent shadows in the corners of the Fortress of Hera. I hold it within me, a crack, a fault line that must be borne like a hidden wound.
I can bear it, for all life is like a wound, and the bearing of it sets our character, and sears our soul into something greater, anneals it into a vaster whole.
Pain. I embrace pain. It is the universe’s way of telling you that you are alive.
I
The Frontier
Si vis pacem, para bellum
‘If you want peace, prepare for war’
– ancient Terran axiom
One
The black dream that was the unending warble of the war drums went on and on, as fierce and insistent as the beating of an ork heart. It stilled the jungle noises, and thrummed up into the star-spattered sky. The ork host danced and cavorted and bayed at the moons above the many fires of the encampment, thousands of enormous primates baring their fangs and grappling and killing and lacerating one another’s flesh in an outpouring of sheer bestial energy.
The prisoners were turning on the spits, their screaming long done. Brug sat on his throne-stone and rested his knuckles on the ground, his knees as high as his ears, his head like some savagely sculpted mountain rock that an avalanche has smashed into jagged relief. His eyes gleamed red. Watchful, full of angry malice and an intelligence that none of his tribe could match.
His time had come. He could feel it humming in his blood.
Around him the three warbosses of the host stood gloweri
ng, impatient, full of the aimless rage of the ork, and yet cowed into silence by their lord’s mere presence. These were creatures out of a primeval nightmare, brought into being for one purpose only, as single-minded as a wildfire. It took an enormous will to bend such beasts to a single purpose, to bring them together and make them cooperate.
Brug had that will. He brought such fear into his fellow orks that they were willing to obey rather than rebel. They were incapable of affection or loyalty, but they knew respect. As long as Brug could kill the strongest of them, as long as his plans worked, and there was fighting and loot and blood to be had, then they would follow him, as the stones roll in the grip of the flood.
‘We gots to have more than this,’ Brug said, the words spat out from between mismatched fangs. ‘We needs more than this. Our big-ships is ready and full and round our heads right now.’ He looked up, the massive skull turning on a neck as thick as a bull’s.
‘This world is eaten through. There ain’t nothing left here for us but bones and rock. We needs to go and find a new place, and other tribes to mangle. Otherways, these boys will turn on one another, and we’ll piss away all that was done here. All that I done here.’ He looked at the three warbosses, hulking shadows with red-lit eyes.
A deep ‘Huuurgh’ of assent came out of them.
‘Let ’em have fun for a little more, but anyone starts a big fight, you take their heads and remind ’em that they belong to me.’
He paused, the red glare of his gaze turning slowly to catch the warbosses one by one. They looked away. To meet his eyes was to challenge, and they were not ready for that. Brug had slain all challengers to his rule, and there had been many. There was no longer an ork left on the planet that could come close to matching him for guile or for sheer brute strength, and they knew it.
As did he. Something like humour flashed across his face, a savage sneer.
‘You all belongs to me. I gives the orders, and you obeys. That way, we is mighty. If it wasn’t for Brug yous would all be little warchiefs still, running in the jungle and raiding farms by night. Now we have us a whole world in our fists. I did that, Brug Greenstorm. I brought the clans together. I set yous at the cities, and was first over the walls of the big capital, the high place of the pink flesh. Don’t you never forget it.’
The fires blazed, the night was bright with them. On the horizon behind Brug there was a mighty red glow: a burning Imperial city. It was still being sacked by the orks. Brug had brought out his bodyguard and his warbosses from within the broken walls after they had run riot for three days, leaving the rest of the army to eat and loot and pick over the survivors for slaves.
He was always most comfortable out here, in the jungle. He hated the stone and plascrete cities of the pink flesh with a vengeance. Even their manufactoria he wrecked and despoiled and destroyed, rather than keep running. He wanted nothing from the enemies of the orks but sport and spoils. And a name. He wanted that most of all. Brug Greenstorm, he would be remembered as. He would write that name across whole worlds in the blood of their inhabitants.
‘You is to start after the middle of the night, and get the clans all gathered up together. Come sunrise, we’ll call us down the shuttle-ships and start to load up the boys for the big wagons, up in the Great Dark. There is a skinful of other worlds out there just waiting for us, ripe as red meat.’
‘Where is they?’ one of the other orks ventured.
With a roar, Brug sprang up, leaping off his throne-stone. He came down like a green flailing tree on the ork who had spoken, and swept one great arm across the creature’s face. His claws ripped out an eye, tore the meat from the bone, and sent the powerful warboss flying backwards, a thousand pounds of flesh and bone toppling into the grass.
‘No one asks Brug questions. You obey me, see? Or I will eat you, maggot.’
He stood over the fallen warboss. The other two backed away, clashing their teeth and opening their hands in submission. The injured ork on the ground spat out blood.
‘Yes, chief.’
‘Next time, I chews on your tongue, Krobag, and serves you up as snotling meat.’
‘I hear you, boss.’ The injured ork cowered, but was unable to dim the furious hatred that blazed out of its remaining eye.
‘I is the high boss of this here army. I will make us a Waaagh! the likes of which none of the pink-flesh scum of this here sector of the Dark has ever known. I will find yous foes to kill and stomp which is worthy of the fight. Do yous hear me, you filth?’
‘We hears,’ they all said, snarling on the words.
‘We is the ork. We is the fear in the Great Dark, the red light in the night. They will hear our drums out there in them stars, and they will know we is coming for them.’
Brug opened his massive arms wide. ‘And we will chew it all up, kill it all, taste every gobbet. Nothing is stronger than us. There ain’t nothing can make us stop.’
He gurgled out a laugh that was part speech, part meaningless, hungry bellow.
‘We was made for this, boys. And ain’t it sweet.’
Two
Lord Lucius Fennick looked down upon Zalathras from a balcony off to one side of the grand chamber he liked to call his map room.
A teeming sea of low-rise buildings rolled out halfway to the horizon, tawny under the sun, and from it reared up the looming spikes of two hive-spires, both still under construction. Jagged mountains erected not by nature, but by the hand of man. The smoke haze hung blue in the still, humid air about them.
Zalathras. How many millions toiled in those high spires, or down in that tawny sea? More than at the last census, by far. Now that the space port was finished, they came almost daily – in creaking shuttles from Iax and Espandor, and in dribbles even from the agri worlds – Quintarn, Tarentus, Masali – places long tamed and civilised.
To this world – green, steaming Zalidar, this barely polished gem of a planet on the Eastern Fringe, beyond Ultramar, almost beyond the bounds of the Imperium itself. A place that had been nothing more than a wilderness a generation before, but was now on the brink of full Imperial compliance.
Most of the backbone of the workforce was from the Zalidari System itself – they came because they were restless, or discontented, or they sought a wider horizon, a new challenge. Well, they got it here.
Others were indentured workers brought in by the thousand to fulfil labour quotas – the grist that was ground in the mill of the burgeoning Zalidari industries.
Four million inhabitants at the last census, ten years ago. There must be double that now in Zalathras alone, Fennick thought, savouring the number in his mind.
We are on the brink of great things on Zalidar. One day we might even rival Iax for production. If only we can keep up the pace!
The building crews worked in shifts round the clock. His people needed housing; the shanty towns that they had once hacked out of the jungle were a mere memory. Now, Zalathras was a city, a true city with high walls and paved streets and thrumming manufactoria. At long last, the labour disputes were ended; brought to a close by the iron fist of the Zalidari militia, which now patrolled orderly districts of true citizens. One day soon, it would be the Adeptus Arbites who did so, and the militia would give way to the Imperial Guard.
We are so close, Fennick thought. If Ultramar’s resources were not stretched so thin, we would have been brought into compliance by now.
So dense was the population that the walls could barely encompass it. So they had begun to build upwards more and more, rather than let the city sprawl beyond the defences. The hive-spires grew day by day, so that the tallest of them lost their lofty heads in cloud when the rains came. The Imperium was rising up here in all its glory.
This is civilisation, Fennick thought. This is how worlds are made. One day, we will be a pillar of Ultramar, and if the Emperor wills it, I will make a pilgrimage to Macragge itself, and I
will look upon great Guilliman in his shrine, and see the wound that bleeds eternally through the shimmer of the holy stasis field that sustains him. I will look upon the face of a primarch. That, I have promised myself.
‘Throne be praised,’ a voice said behind him. ‘The Kalgatt Spire looks near finished. I have not seen the view from this high in an age. Zalathras looms above the Tagus like a titan rising from the sea. Standing this high, it almost seems we have tamed this damned world.’
‘If only that were so, Boros,’ Fennick said. He turned and smiled. He was a long, lean man with the grace and poise of someone much younger than his fifty years. His black beard was oiled to a point, and his eyes were as grey as a sea from a colder world.
‘You know as well as anyone that over most of the planet, the Tagus still holds sway. Our logging teams have cleared a quarter of one continent, no more. There are places near the poles where man has not yet set foot – not even that damned mountebank, Morcault – and mountains yet unclimbed in the hinterland of Zalathras itself.’
‘All in good time, my lord,’ the man called Boros said gruffly. He was a brown man, brown of hair, brown of skin, heavily tanned and stocky as an owl. The scars on his face were all the more livid for his colouring, white lines that striped his cheek from eye to chin. He wore a leather battle-harness, old-fashioned armour crafted to protect against blade and claw, but for all that there was a laspistol holstered at his hip, and a colonel’s stars on his shoulders.
‘Soon we must think more on the outlying towns, it’s true,’ he said. ‘The roads are still all but impassable in the rainy season. They must be paved, all the way out to the coast. And the Dromion Bridge is insufficient for the traffic that now crosses it.’
Fennick waved a hand. ‘You tell me nothing that I and the Council do not know, Boros. We were discussing it all morning. But eventually I made Vanaheim and Rosquin see sense. We must increase the supply of building material substantially, especially now that we have the two hives under construction.’
‘Then the plascrete manufactoria are to be enlarged at last?’
