by John French
‘Your will is mine,’ he said, voice rolling like gravel on stone. Armina watched as control and instinct to trust and obey contained the questions pushing to the surface.
‘It is not a decision I am contemplating without cause,’ said Dorn.
‘My lord, I would never think–’
‘Your concerns are not without basis,’ said Dorn. Armina felt the hard edges of his presence blur, soften and reshape. ‘You wonder why I would take strength from our defences and throw them out into the dark? If you have such doubts then others will. You will have to be able to answer them. You must understand the cause.’
Dorn turned to look at Armina Fel. She could not see the movement, but the focus of his intent was like the heat from an open furnace door.
‘Mistress,’ he said, his voice soft and controlled. ‘If I may ask you to share the message from the Esteban System?’
She bobbed her head in answer and began the steps of recall. She pressed the first knuckle of the index finger of her left hand against her thumb and inhaled a single breath in perfect time with the beat of her heart. The keystone memory of the scent of smoke from her father’s cooking fire filled her senses...
Her mind flattened. Thoughts dropped away. The impression of the astropathic message rose into sight. It crackled in her mind’s eye – a pillar made of broken shards, held together by mist. She let its meaning fill her.
The means by which she, and her fellow astropaths, defied the physical limits of communication were simple to express, but almost impossible to understand. The astropaths sent messages by using their telepathic abilities augmented by the gift given to them when they were bound in soul to the Emperor, throwing meaning into the beyond. To receive a message they cast their minds into the warp and caught it from the aether, as though they were pulling fish from the sea in nets. On thousands of worlds, ships and space stations, choirs of men and women circulated the information that the Imperium, and now its civil war, needed to exist. That was what most knew of astropaths – and it was wrong.
Dreams and metaphor wrapped in the soul screams of humans who burned with fire from within, thrown and falling through a storm of nightmare and paradox, to be heard by minds wandering through ghost realms of thought, in fragments of sensation, sight and emotion. That was the picture of her craft that she had once painted for a mundane human who had wanted to know the truth. And even that was a lie.
The truth was inexpressible to those who lacked the ability to walk those dark places. So when she folded her mind back into the precise recall, she did not remember words; she was possessed by a universe of sensation, inference and symbolism. She was the fire of meaning, and the cold words that came from her mouth were a shadow cast through a pinhole by a hidden inferno.
‘Outer system defences have fallen,’ she said in the silence, and she felt her will holding back the pressure that was trying to push out from within her. ‘Ships from the dark. They are here. They have come. We will hold to the last.’
The words ended. The fire of meaning drained back into her memory, and she was as she had been before: an old woman bent with time, shivering as though she had been doused in ice water.
Rogal Dorn reached out and rested his hand on her shoulder.
‘Thank you, mistress,’ he said, and she felt the tremble in her muscles lessen. She straightened.
‘Do you wish me to recall the others, lord?’
‘No,’ said Dorn. ‘That is sufficient.’
She felt the small, sad smile, even though she could not see his face.
‘As you will it, lord,’ she said.
He turned back to Effried.
‘That message was received two days ago,’ he said. ‘The time of sending cannot be certain. It could have been sent on the same day as we received it, or weeks before. We cannot know. But its meaning is clear.’
‘Esteban has fallen, or is close to falling,’ said Effried.
Dorn must have nodded, but in Armina’s mind the shape of his aura did not change.
‘There are other messages,’ said Dorn. ‘Most are fragments, echoes of cries for help or warning. Nisos, Mons Galita, Hentaron. But the messages say less than the silences. The number of worlds from whom we have had no word, grows.’
‘Phaeton...’ said Effried, speaking the name of the great forge world that lay within the dominion of Terra.
‘Not just Phaeton. There are many more. They may still stand, and it may be that the storms in the warp have covered them, or that something has happened to the astropathic relay stations. But even those possibilities suggest that the enemy is moving.’
‘A systematic attack across that volume could mean–’
‘It could mean many things, but cannot go unanswered. The enemy will come, and we will not stand here while the night falls, and the fires of their advance light the sky. We have a chance to break them before they can reach our walls, before they expect to face us.’
‘So we go out into the dark,’ stated Effried, and Armina thought she heard an edge of relish in his words, ‘to face the unknown.’
‘That, my son, is what we were made for.’
Garrison Station Creto
Jupiter orbit
General Hesio Argentos was silent on the shuttle journey back from the Lion of the Last Kingdom. Fifteen other officers sat with him as the frame of the shuttle rattled around them. The green of their dress uniforms looked black in the yellow-tinted dark, the silver frogging reduced to the colour of tarnished brass. The officers said nothing to each other, and only a few exchanged glances. He knew why, of course.
He was old enough that at the outbreak of the war within the Imperium he had been a decade past his last field service. A largely honorary position in the Jovian levies had been his to enjoy, as had the indulgence of a mild addiction to spiced liquor. He had had little to do except wither in body and grow in spite. He would have been far down the list for a return to active command, but he had too much experience, and there was too much to do. So they had given him a new uniform, rank, and thirty thousand men and women to command.
It was not a change of situation that improved his demeanour. The niceties he might have affected in his younger days had long fled. His silences seldom meant anything good, and often were just the shadow cast by a storm of temper. He was a difficult man, and his officers hated him. He knew this about them, and about himself. What would have surprised them most was that he did not hate them back.
‘Yes?’ he said, catching a glance from Astrid Kellan, the youngest of the senior officers under his command. ‘Is there a question you wish to ask me, colonel?’ He let the words roll with scorn. To her credit the young colonel did not flinch.
‘Are there fresh orders, sir? From the Praetorian?’
‘As a matter of fact there are,’ he said, sighing. ‘I was going to save the surprise, but as you are so keen to get on with it... All units are to come to full fighting status. Armour, weapons, everything and everyone prepared and readied to move for transport and/or deployment, within twelve hours from the moment we reach the garrison station.’
‘Everyone, sir?’ asked another officer, a brigadier called Sutarn. A hard man, efficient and quiet.
‘That is correct.’
‘Where are we deploying to, sir?’ asked Colonel Kellan, and again Argentos noticed that she had the courage to ask what all the others did not. He would have to watch her.
He grinned, pulling his lips all the way back from his spice-blackened teeth.
‘That is not something that the honoured Praetorian – greatest of the last loyal sons of the Emperor, who is the lord and master of all that bleeds and breathes from here to the edge of the unknown – graced me with the authority to tell you.’ He smiled a cold and broad smile. ‘When that state of affairs changes, you will be the first to be apprised, colonel.’
‘It is bad then?
’
She really is brave, he thought.
‘That depends if your definition of bad includes bringing closer the possibility of dying or having something shot or hacked off you.’
Kellan did not ask another question, and the rest of the journey passed in uneasy silence.
Hours later, alone in the dark of his quarters with a thick measure of spice liquor, he ran the situation around his mind. A strategic shift of this magnitude, commanded by Rogal Dorn himself... It was significant. Useful? Potentially, but it was difficult to be certain. But even though he did not know what the Praetorian was intending, he was certain that it was something big. Half the forces from Terra’s Third Sphere of defences... That was considerable battle strength. Moving them from their current position alone would mean that the configuration of the system’s defences would change profoundly. And... and if other forces were being called on then... then... Yes, his first instinct had been correct. He could not ignore this.
He put the crystal tumbler down, checked his quarters and made sure that the deadlocks were engaged on each of the doors. When he was satisfied that he was alone, he took the ceremonial dagger from his belt. The silver tiger head with its emerald eyes looked at him from the pommel. The inscription ‘Sutarais’ ran across the narrow cross-guard. It had been given to him by a praetor of the Legiones Astartes at the close of his last campaign during the Great Crusade, no less. He often told his officers that, though he never said from which Legion it had come. He always carried it, and anyone who knew him expected it to be with him whether he was in dress greens or in field greys. It was as constant a feature of his persona as the acidic temper.
He pulled the dagger free, looked at it and broke it into pieces. A series of fast, precise movements, and the dagger was a series of fragments. From within the pommel he took the cipher device. From the centre of the blade came the length of silver wire, and the lens reader from under the face of the tiger.
It took him several minutes to assemble the components and read the wire. Rows of tiny letters, finer than a hair, ran down the strand of silver. He did not need all the information the wire contained, just the transmission procedure for a flash message of high importance. He found what he needed, memorised it, and then began to encipher his message.
Half Third Sphere force on alert for warp transit by Rogal Dorn’s personal command. Possible extra-system strike planned. Target and timing unknown.
The cipher device took the words, and compressed and folded them in random noise. What had been words was now a cough of static. Then he reassembled the dagger, leaving only the cipher device out. It lay on the wood of his desk, next to the glass of liquor. He looked at it for a long while.
It had been ten years since he had last served the Legion, and since then the possibility that he would again had grown smaller and smaller in his mind. Even with the coming of war it had seemed remote. But now the moment had come, just as they had said it would.
From here it would not be difficult. All he needed to do was record an innocent message – a request for supplies, a clarification of orders, or something else equally mundane – and send the blurt of static at the same time. The frequency inscribed on the silver wire was one of several hundred existing Imperial channels. Some of them were channels his communications officers used every day. That was the beauty of the Alpha Legion; it was everywhere, woven into the fabric of the Imperium. That was part of the reason he had accepted their offer of service all those years ago – the elegance and audacity of what they did. Being part of something so superior had seemed the highest form of validation he could be granted.
But now he was not so sure if that reason held, not in the face of what was happening to the Imperium.
This act would make him a traitor.
He looked at the device, just a narrow tube of machinery given to him by a warrior who he had respected. The words on it were few, the details vague, but what might they mean in the hands of the Legion? He had seen them destroy civilisations with weapons spun from nothing. What might they do with those scraps of information?
Despite the mask he wore, he was neither a cruel, nor a spiteful man. He had just learned long ago the value of wearing a different face. The Legion had noticed that about him. They had complimented both his wisdom and his skill at deception when they asked him to serve. Yes, flattery had played its part, but that was not enough for this. He was a liar, but he also believed in loyalty. But which loyalty?
He shook his head at last and stood. He pulled on his dress coat and dropped the cipher device into the pocket. He paused, blinked, and then he picked up the glass and drank the liquor in a single movement. He walked to the door, letting the mask drop across his face as he exited his quarters. The communications watch would be changing soon, and he wanted to arrive just before that happened. He had a message to send.
Battle-barge Alpha
The interstellar gulf beyond the light of Sol
‘Begin the burn now,’ he said from the command throne.
‘Compliance,’ replied a servitor.
A brief clatter of cogwork sounded, and then cut out, leaving him alone with the hum of his armour. He sat back in the throne. Two minutes later the servitor jerked in its niche.
‘Message received, by all vessels, order is being executed.’
He nodded to himself, and then leant back, eyes closed. In his mind the consequence of his order painted the image that the blast shutters hid from him.
The war fleet turned over and over, cold and dark, spinning towards a speck of light that shone fractionally brighter than the others that dotted the void. Fire kindled in the engines of one ship, and for an instant its rotation became a wild spiral. Then the fire grew, caught the ship’s momentum and pushed it into a smooth arc. The ship would be one of the damaged ones, perhaps a macro transporter, its outer plating torn away, or a light cruiser with its gun-decks gutted by meteor impacts. Like the rest of those who would reach the outer defences first, it would look like one of the ragged vessels that had been clawing at Terra for the last years. It would push free from the cloud of spinning ships. More would follow, their engines lighting one after another, until close to a hundred had broken free of the main fleet. Once free they would turn their prows towards the distant point of light that was their destination. And the hundreds of other ships in the cloud would tumble on in cold silence.
Lord of Conquest
865.M30
One hundred and forty years before the Betrayal at Isstvan III
I
The wind was rising across the plain beneath the unfinished fortress. Archamus watched as the air caught the dust from the tops of the water levees and pulled them up into spinning columns. Dust devils, that was the Terran phrase for them. Katafalque, raised in the Gobi wastes, had used the phrase, and it had stuck in Archamus’ mind. Devil, as though there were a malignancy in the movement of particles and air. A strange phrase.
He watched as the dust devils spun across the flat, green fields of crops. Banks of dry earth bounded each of the fields, and water chuckled at the bottom of the deep ditches that divided them. Further off, the wide channel of the river curved around the foot of a range of hills. Above the valley floor, every inch of the hillsides was brown. Insects sang amongst a covering of tinder-dry grass and scrub. The heat of the sun beat down from the blue sky, unrelenting and merciless. None of the human inhabitants would emerge from their houses for many hours. Apart from the time spanning dawn and dusk, the land was left to the dust and wind.
Archamus looked back to the eyepiece of the theodolite. A blur of grey stone filled his view. He turned a dial and the sighting stake atop the half-built wall snapped into focus. He looked down at the numbers on the polished brass plates. He smiled. The estimate he had made by sight matched the measurement. He unhooked the wax tablet from his waist, and scored the values into the surface.
‘A rather archa
ic method,’ said Voss from behind him. Archamus heard the emissary drop onto the top of the wall.
‘The people of ancient times raised structures which stood for millennia using such tools.’
‘And by the sweat and blood of millions of slaves, but I doubt that you would advocate reinstating those practices.’
Voss came and stood beside him, eyes narrowed against the glare. He had a broad, strong face, with a neat black beard. A ponytail hung down his back. He wore a long coat of layered brown and deep purple despite the heat, and a broad-brimmed hat. Rings glittered on the thumbs and fingers of each hand. He was tall, for a human, but moved with a forceful grace that spoke of muscle under the layers of clothes. His skin had tanned fast since his arrival on the planet, deepening in colour with every cycle of the sun.
He had been with the expedition for only six months, but Archamus had already spoken to him many times. An emissary of some nebulous authority, he had attached himself to the compliance force left on Rennimar, and had been asking questions and watching Archamus and the other Imperial Fists ever since. The man had a habit of appearing when no one else was around, as though summoned by solitude.
‘May I, sergeant?’ asked Voss, as he moved next to the theodolite. He put his eye to the viewing scope and touched the dials on the side before Archamus could reply. Archamus felt his face and fingers twitch before he could suppress the reaction.
‘Do you always do it this way?’ asked Voss, still looking through the scope.
‘What are you referring to?’
Voss looked up from the scope.
‘Measure lengths and angles yourself, by hand?’
‘I learned to quarry stone with pick, hammer and wedge. I carved my first stone by hand and drew my first plans with soot ink on parchment. That is the way we learn, from first principles.’ He paused and looked out across the plain. He could see the servitor gangs already at work in the quarries they had cut in the foothills ten miles away. ‘I do not always use those ways, but when I can, I do.’
