by Paul Kearney
He did so love a good map. They made the world clear and ordered and intelligible.
This one showed his beloved Zalathras as a hexagonal red dot in a pale expanse of open country, crossed by the brown slow waters of the Dromion River to the south, and then, fifty miles beyond that, the sea of green that was the Tagus, the great Southern Jungle that led down to the Pole, and the Morcault Mountains, at the base of the world.
Ghent Morcault, who claimed to have landed on those mountains and walked their slopes, was somewhere out there in his ramshackle ship even now. If not on the planet itself, then elsewhere in the system for sure, pursuing his crack-brained dreams.
The old man was eighty if he was a day, a legend upon Zalidar. Once a small-time trader, he had landed his ship in a small clearing on the banks of the Dromion some fifty years before and had named the river after his trading partner, a drunken ne’er-do-well long dead and famous only for the river that took his name. Then he had hopped all over the planet in his creaking little freighter, naming features and mapping the basic geography of the unclaimed world.
Not one mountain to my name, Fennick thought petulantly. And yet it was I who made Zalathras what it is today. I commissioned the building of the walls, the space port, the first of the hive-spires. And Morcault, the old miscreant, he has an entire mountain range named after him. Where is the justice in that?
Even the city itself had been named by Imperial edict, after Gaius Zalathras, who had been high up in the Administratum of Ultramar at the time.
We should have named it after a hero of the Imperium, Fennick thought. Something stirring, a name to catch fire and draw the eye of Macragge to the Eastern Fringe. We should have named it Sicarius, or Fabian, after the captains of the blessed Ultramarines. Or Calgar, perhaps.
But he knew that these ideas were presumptuous, absurd even. As jealous as the Adeptus Astartes were of their honour, they did not name planets after themselves. Their names lived on in the glory of their deeds, not in the words carved above some city gate.
He left the comm chamber with an eye on his wrist chrono. He grimaced as he paced the long echoing corridor towards his own offices.
Perhaps there will be a city named Fennick one day, the lord of Zalidar thought. His face twisted in self-mockery at the thought.
Probably long after I am gone.
His aides were seated in the anteroom, but sprang up as he approached. He smiled at them, remembering other young, earnest faces, all of them long dead. He closed the door to his offices and uttered a sigh. Sometimes he saw them yet, the faces of those dead.
Fennick had not always been a lord. A soldier first, he had served in the Astra Militarum alongside Boros in the Thrax campaign, fighting Chaos cultists and all manner of teeming horrors. The Guard had been defeated by the Great Enemy on that unhappy planet, and the Adeptus Astartes had been called in.
Thirty-eight thousand of the Guard had fallen on Thrax, four full divisions torn to pieces in the space of a few weeks. The things he had seen there still haunted Fennick’s nightmares. A young sergeant, he had been given a battlefield commission after all the officers in his company were dead. And Boros had been there beside him, older, more experienced, but lacking the latent tactical sense that Fennick possessed and that had kept the company from being entirely wiped out.
The two of them had handled the bloody withdrawal to the drop-ships when the order came to evacuate, and as they had lifted off to rejoin what was left of the fleet they had seen through the grimy viewports of the troop hold something that Fennick would ever after have burned across his memory.
A Space Marine battle-barge, miles long, bristling with weaponry, painted deep blue and adorned with the Ultima sigil of the Ultramarines. Marneus Calgar himself had come to the fray, along with three full companies of the Adeptus Astartes. They had dropped on Thrax like avenging angels, bearing fire and death.
But even that was not enough. The Chaos taint ran too deep. The Ultramarines had defeated the enemy on the ground – three hundred Adeptus Astartes accomplishing what sixty thousand of the Astra Militarum had failed to do. And still it was not enough.
The order had gone out – an Exterminatus, the destruction of all life on Thrax, even though the planet was a forge world, vital to the military economy of Ultramar.
From orbit, Fennick and Boros had watched an entire world die, the Ultramarines raining cyclonic torpedoes down upon it in a pattern that seared the surface of the planet down to the gutrock. Even the atmosphere had been burned away.
The concussions of its destruction rocked the transports in high orbit. There were millions burned up in that holocaust, men and women who still clung to life, struggling to survive in the swamp of Chaos that their home world had become. But they were expendable, mere kindling caught up in the fiery rage of the Angels of Death.
Thrax was now a dead thing, a globe of rock upon which no man had set foot since.
The world had been saved; the world had been destroyed. It was the same thing to the Ultramarines.
Boros was right, Fennick thought with something of a shiver. Sorrow follows them wherever they go, the Angels of the Emperor. They are not human, and they do not think as humans do.
After the Thrax campaign, Fennick and Boros had been shipped to Zalidar on garrison duty along with what was left of their decimated company. The world was a backwater colony upon which a few thousand settlers struggled to hack a living out of the jungle. Contact with Ultramar was intermittent, and life was harsh.
That had been thirty-one years ago.
It was no sinecure, this posting. Of all those men Fennick had brought to Zalidar from the Thrax campaign, only he and Boros now remained. The Tagus and the beasts had claimed the rest.
Fennick remembered one of his last veterans, doughty Jarik Samos – who had come through all the bloody carnage of Thrax – dying outside his own barracks from a snakebite. The white, disbelieving face of the dying man. To survive so much, only to be taken down by such a trifle.
As time went on, Fennick and Boros had taken the running of the colony into their own hands, for want of better candidates, and with the founding of Zalathras, orders had come through from the Imperial Administratum for Fennick to take over the planetary governorship on a pro-tem basis. He was an unknown young officer, but he had made his mark and had been rewarded for it.
Either that, he thought sourly, or no one of superior rank thought it a title worth holding. He was governor of what amounted to a small town, on a hostile planet at the very edge of human space.
But it was a beginning. And thus in name at least, the young lieutenant of guardsmen became a lord, and Boros was promoted to colonel of Zalidar’s defence force.
Colonel of a few hundred badly armed militiamen. They were not much, by the standards of the Imperium, but they had sufficed – just – to keep the colony on its feet.
In time, the city had begun to grow, as more settlers arrived from all over the Eastern Fringe, and the beasts of the jungle had been thinned out by bloody killing drives, which both Fennick and Boros had led. Something like a true economy had become established, as opposed to the barter markets of old. And the Administratum seemed to forget that Fennick’s promotion had been a temporary, stop-gap measure. The years went by, and they hacked farmland and towns out of the Tagus, and tried to attract as many settlers and colonists as they could to Zalidar, for they needed people above all else.
Manpower, and money. The pillars of success.
Zalidar had been largely left alone after that, a forgotten frontier world that had escaped the heavy tithes levied on long-established planets further to the galactic west. This oversight had allowed private enterprise to thrive to a surprising degree on an otherwise primitive world.
Fennick smiled. He remembered the day old Ferdia Rosquin had made planetfall with a shuttleload of clerks, to set up a branch of the first bank on t
he planet. He had known in that moment that they would survive, and, more than that, they would prosper. With loans taken out from Rosquin’s bank they had brought in heavy machinery and materials, paid Vanaheim’s construction company to begin the circuit of Zalathras’ tall walls – they had seemed far too long, back then, for the population within them – and dug the foundations of Alphon Spire. Not because they needed to build upwards for lack of space – it was to make a statement. Zalidar had arrived. And Zalathras began at last to assume the trappings of a genuine city.
One day the Imperium would take note of it, and the planet would be called upon to make its contribution to the unending war effort, which taxed all of humanity amid the stars, but for now, Ultramar looked the other way, and Zalidar grew steadily.
Ghent Morcault had turned up again around the time of the wall’s building. A rogue trader with a talent for tracking down elusive cargoes, his help had been invaluable in those early years. But as Zalathras expanded and the city’s needs burgeoned, his little ramshackle freighter – the Mayfly, he called it – had proved inadequate in both tonnage and reliability, and Morcault had made it his business to set off on what he called his expeditions, in a quest to map the surface of the planet and explore the system surrounding it.
Fennick and Boros helped him out from time to time, with repairs and supplies, and in return, every time Morcault returned to Zalathras they were able to fill in a little more of the blank space on Fennick’s beloved maps. The trader had spent decades doing what an Imperial survey vessel could have accomplished in a few months, but there were no survey ships available, not for Zalidar, and so Morcault’s eccentric quest had a use of sorts.
But in the last few years his wanderings had become more and more unpredictable, and he seemed wrapped up more in his own personal obsession with the planet and the system it inhabited, rather than any systematic methodology of survey. Ninety per cent of Zalidar was explored now, thanks to him, but there were times when Fennick traced his fingers over the features on his charts, and wondered just how reliable the old space-tramp’s data was.
One day, Zalidar would be mapped properly by a dedicated Imperial survey team of the Administratum, but for now, Morcault’s discoveries were the official version of the planet’s geography, for good or ill.
A knock on the tall doors behind him. It made him start, he had been so lost in his own memories.
‘Yes,’ he barked.
When did I begin to sound so much like a bad-tempered sergeant major? Fennick wondered to himself.
An aide put his head around the door. ‘My lord, Rear Admiral Glenck requests an audience.’
Fennick sighed, and waved a hand. ‘Show him in, Pherias. And fetch some wine. The good stuff, mind.’
‘Yes, my lord.’
He had been expecting this. Fennick took a seat behind his desk and adjusted his scarlet sash of office. He touched for a second the Silver Starburst he had won on Thrax, which bore the gems of two wounds upon it.
Those were simpler days, he thought. But when one is young everything seems simple, even life and death.
Glenck was a broad, heavily built man with a wide, florid face. In his own youth, he must have been formidable, but the muscle had softened, giving him a look of pink, unbaked dough. Two eyes blinked in that slab of a face, black as broken coal. Fennick had never heard him laugh, not once in the five years since he had been seconded to Zalidar.
The two of them were of an age, but, through no fault of his own, Glenck had seen very little combat. Rising up through the command tree over the dead bodies of his more combative colleagues, Glenck was one of those men who get promoted because no one is sure what else to do with them.
He knew this, and it rankled him. He resented his posting to quiet, forgotten Zalidar. He resented the fact that someone of his rank had only half a dozen obsolete ships to command. He resented the way his life had panned out. That resentment had made him into a sour martinet, but he was still able to play the system as well as any. Fennick could not afford to antagonise him too much; the Administratum did not like annoyed rear admirals sending memos and missives from the back of beyond.
‘My dear Glenck, how happy I am to see you.’
He stood up, shook the naval officer’s clammy hand, and gestured to a chair. Pherias, bringing in the wine, covered up the admiral’s lack of reciprocity.
Five years, Fennick thought, steepling his fingers together behind the wide desk. A long time to be sitting on one’s rump, letting the self-pity turn to bitterness.
‘You know why I am here, my lord,’ Glenck said. He did not touch his wine.
‘Do I?’ Fennick sipped his own. It was warm, like everything else on Zalidar. But he had grown used to drinking alcohol that was blood temperature.
‘One of my ships has left orbit and is powering off to the back of beyond on your orders, thanks to the meddling of Colonel Boros.’
‘Ah, the Hesiod. That is correct, admiral.’
Glenck did not blink. ‘That is an unwarranted and irregular intervention on your part. Orders to the fleet come from me, and I alone am responsible for ship dispositions. They shall hear of this in Ultramar, I assure you.’
But will they care? Fennick wondered wearily.
‘Colonel Boros put a convincing case–’ he began.
Glenck snorted. He had a face well suited to a snort, like that of a snub-nosed pig. ‘I heard Colonel Boros’ case. Some vague rumour which was probably nothing more than an augur shadow, and the usual vagaries of the vox. And for that he came crying to me for the loan of a Sword-class frigate and a four-thousand-man crew – a skeleton crew, mark you – to send them out to the edge of the system and sweep in circles until doomsday. It was arrant nonsense.’
‘A long-range patrol of the system does not seem so fantastical to me,’ Fennick said mildly.
‘We have a patrol,’ Glenck snapped. ‘I do my job. Zalidar is protected by a combat patrol night and day.’
‘Short-range fighters, admiral. The Furies extend our sensor knowledge half a million miles beyond high orbit.’
‘I work with what I have, my lord. Had we a fleet worthy of the name I would be happy to institute long-range standing patrols, but we do not have the resources. Even our existing ships possess only a tithe of their proper fighting complement. If you would requisition Ultramar for better ships, more trained personnel–’
‘Yes, yes.’ Fennick held up a hand. This was old ground. And besides, Glenck was in the right of it.
In the last ten years, Zalidar’s population had quadrupled, but the armed forces that guarded it had remained stuck at a level more suited to an outpost. The militia – some twenty thousand soldiers – was all very well, but the planet needed orbital defences, deep-space vessels and anti-air missiles. Six ageing frigates and destroyers and a few dozen orbital fighters would barely slow down a determined adversary, especially since the two larger ships, the Sword-class vessels, were undermanned and underequipped with munitions.
‘Admiral, you know I am one with you on this issue. I have sent request after request to Calth, and Lord Joule has been very polite, but uncooperative. There are ongoing incursions within Ultramar itself, and the Ultramarines have companies scattered all over the sector fighting half a dozen wars. Orks, eldar and the Great Enemy itself – they are all exerting pressure on Imperial resources at present. Our system is quiet, and has been for decades. We are at the bottom of the list; it’s as simple as that. We were lucky to get the two frigates. I lobbied for years to obtain them.’
Fennick held up his hands and smiled like a reasonable man, though inwardly he was both irritated and bored by Glenck’s whining. What a great child the man was! No wonder he had been shunted off here to this backwater. The thought of him in charge of a proper combat fleet was one to chill the blood.
‘Then if we are to work with what we have,’ Glenck snarled,
‘I must at least insist that you allow me to issue my own orders to my own command. Shipmaster Relisch came to me after he received your orders, and since they bore your imprimatur, I allowed the mission to proceed. But this flouting of the chain of command is wholly unacceptable, my lord. It breaks down discipline, injects an element of uncertainty into the command process, and–’
‘And it makes you look bad,’ Fennick drawled.
For a second he thought Glenck would lean over the desk and strike him. He almost hoped the man would. He would have him arrested, confined to quarters, and one source of headaches would be removed from the day-to-day running of the planet. But Glenck was too wise for that. His jowls quivered, and the pudgy fist remained clenched.
‘I find that comment offensive,’ he snapped.
You find everything offensive, you fat bore, Fennick thought. But what he said was, ‘I apologise, admiral. I spoke flippantly. We must at all costs work in harmony, you and I. You are quite right, of course. But perhaps we could see the Hesiod’s mission as a training mission, if nothing else. The fleet has done little but remain in a standard orbit these last eighteen months.’
‘They remain there to safeguard the security of this planet,’ Glenck said stubbornly.
‘They are not numerous enough or well enough equipped for that task. They are perhaps more valuable as intelligence-gathering assets. And surely their captains should jump at the chance for independent command.’
Away from your interference, Fennick added to himself.
‘I am the best judge of what my captains need in terms of mission and training,’ Glenck barked. ‘Your place, my lord, is to tell me your broad strategic needs. I decide how those needs shall be met by the fleet.’
My place? Fennick thought. And he felt the anger rise in him.
‘Very well,’ he grated. And he let Glenck see the anger this time, staring into the fat-framed black eyes.
‘My needs, admiral, include a standing long-range patrol on the edge of the Zalidar System, to give us early warning of any incursion into Zalidari space. I will have that put in writing before the day is out. You may forward that to the Administratum if you please. I certainly shall.
