by John French
Dorn stared at Alpharius, but the Alpha Legion primarch did not reply.
‘I know you, brother,’ continued Dorn. ‘I knew that you were here before I walked through the door. I knew it was you on that throne, but not because you made an error in your masquerade. You made no mistake. Yet I still knew it was you. Think on that, brother. It is not that I do not understand what you are, or what you do. I understand both. We are what we choose to be.’
Dorn turned and walked to the doors. Archamus followed.
‘For the Emperor,’ said Alpharius as Dorn pushed the chamber doors wide.
Dorn paused, then walked on without looking back.
Part Four
Hydra
One
Solar monitor craft Implacable
Trans-Neptunian region
The monitor craft closed swiftly on its target. She was called the Implacable, and she was a block of reactors, armour and guns wearing the shape of a chisel’s head. She was fast and had enough firepower to hurt a ship many times her size. Her quarry was outmatched in all but speed. A scavenger ship, it was one of the small, fast craft that normally skulked in the dark corners of the system. Now it was in the open void, and its engines were flickering with failing power. Aboard the Implacable, auxiliaries ran for boarding craft and airlocks. Orders shook the air as helms locked into place on void suits. Volkites and laslocks activated with a static hum.
The Implacable closed in, eating the distance as the scavenger craft’s engines flickered and died. The scavenger offered no resistance as boarding gantries locked into place. Signals flickered back and forth between the ships. At last the scavenger opened its airlock and the auxiliaries stormed forwards from their boarding gantries. The first wave came fast, flowing out into the scavenger ship’s cargo hold.
Seven figures waited for them: three humans, two clad in body gloves and breathing masks, one in the ragtag finery of a scavenger chieftain. Beside them three Space Marines stood in deep blue. They were still, faces hidden behind their helms. With them was a single figure, also armoured, but somehow seeming greater than the rest.
The auxiliaries slowed as they entered the space. The seven figures at the centre of the room did not move. At last an officer stepped forwards from the circle of soldiers. Like the rest, his void armour was marked with the horned skull of the Saturnyne Rams, but the insignia on his shoulders marked him as a strategos: a senior line officer in the Solar Auxilia. He walked forwards, serpenta pistol drawn. He pushed up his visor, looked at the armoured warriors and then bowed.
‘My lord,’ he said. ‘I respond to the call of Hades.’
Alpharius nodded.
‘Is everything progressing as needed, Strategos Morhan?’
‘We are three hours out. We have the cargo, and our arrival is logged and cleared with First Sphere command. Hydra station has been expecting a replacement astropath for four weeks, and we made sure that the escort orders were issued to us, rather than us requesting the duty. They will let us in because they have asked us to be there.’
‘Hydra station?’ said Ashul, a note of surprise and laughter in his voice.
Every eye turned to him.
‘It is the First Sphere of defence’s primary communications hub, its eyes and its voice,’ rasped Kalix.
‘I know, I just wondered if we were pushing a point.’
No one said anything.
Ashul bowed his head. ‘My apologies, Lord Alpharius.’
Alpharius gave no acknowledgement, but turned to the ragged figure of Sork.
‘My thanks, captain. You have your mission parameters. Carry them out. It will have to look good. The Imperial Fists are no fools.’
Sork bowed his head, face grim.
‘I understand. It has been an honour, my lord.’
‘The greater honour is mine. The hydra wakes,’ Alpharius said, and began to walk through the ranks of auxiliaries, his entourage and Strategos Morhan trailing him as he made for the docking gantries and the monitor craft.
‘For the Emperor,’ called Sork as they left.
Algelth mine
Ariel moon, Uranus orbit
Loading gang boss Thao 4X56 frowned at the man who was shouting at him.
‘What?’ he snarled. The man was one of his crew, a sub loader called Unt 6X67. Stripped to the waist, Unt’s exo-rig gleamed with oil sheen as he waved his servo-claw next to his head and said something again.
Thao couldn’t hear him. Chains and cables were rattling through the pulleys just a metre behind him, and the clank of the loading gang going about its work stole what quiet was left. Unt waved and continued speaking.
‘You dumb clank, I can’t hear you!’ shouted Thao.
Unt shook his head.
Thao stomped over to Unt, gears and pistons doing what his wasted frame couldn’t. He had been on Ariel for a decade since his indent, and those years had a cost. A big cost. The Algelth was the oldest mine on Ariel, bored into the moon’s flesh over thousands of years. Its central pit was tiered and cut down into the dark. Sub passages snaked off it, and its furthest reaches were so remote that some had not been worked for centuries. Capped by a scab of armoured plasteel ten kilometres wide, it was home to hundreds of thousands. It never slept, the tonne upon tonne of rock, crystal and ore that it sent to Mars and the Jovian orbital docks equalled only by the number of workers it ate. Ten years was a long time in the low gravity and cacophony.
Unt was newer, barely a few months fresh from some Terran sump hive. He still had the muscle mass that his pre-indent life had given him. He also still had better hearing than the rest of Thao’s gang.
‘What is it?’ shouted Thao, his face so close to Unt that their cheeks were almost touching.
‘...outing.’
‘What?’
‘Shouting.’
‘You need to shout or I can’t hear you, you dumb piec–’
‘Can you hear the shouting?’ bellowed Unt.
‘Only yours.’
Unt shook his head. Behind them a pulley engine started to wind cable around its drum.
‘I can hear shouting, or singing.’ Unt stuck his arm out, and the exo-rig clattered as it followed the motion. ‘From down there.’
Thao frowned. Unt was pointing down at the dark beyond the edge of the loading gantry. Thao stepped closer to the edge. Looking over he could see the lower gantries and crane rigs criss-crossing the gaping void. Pools of light dotted the gloom where work was done.
‘I can’t hear anything.’
‘Turn your rig off,’ shouted Unt. Thao hesitated, but something in Unt’s manner was making him nervous. He shut his rig down. The drive engine went quiet, and suddenly he was a frozen statue of struts and gears. He listened. The sound of the mine still washed over him: the vibration of hundreds of machines, the clatter of chains and the rumble of deep drills.
Except...
A frown cut the dust-plastered skin of his face.
And he heard it. Low but rising, like a pulse, like...
‘Chanting,’ he said.
‘What?’ shouted Unt.
‘It’s not singing. It’s chanting,’ shouted Thao, and now he could hear it even without trying. A light appeared in the dark at the bottom of the pit. He realised that the rest of his loading gang had stopped their work, looks of puzzlement on their faces.
The indent penalties for loss of productivity crossed his mind, but his eyes were locked on the light beneath. The chanting rose louder and louder, rumbling like a rock fall, louder than the sound of the machinery. He could see figures on the lower gantries and walkways pause and look down into the dark.
‘Halfar...’ said Thao to himself.
‘What?’ called Unt from beside him.
‘It’s what they are chanting – “Halfar to mag”, or something.’
Unt sho
ok his head. The light was flowing up the tiered sides of the pit now, and he could see it did not have one source but many. Thousands of torches held in thousands of hands, oil flames shredding the dark. And the chanting rose and rose as the torch-bearers flowed up and up, faster and faster.
Cries began to ring out, beating against the rhythm of the chanting. Thao started his exo-rig and turned to see overseer troops in their vulcanised armour running to take up firing positions. Guns mounted on the gantries armed and swung their gaze downwards. There had been riots before, even attacks by bands of mutants. But this...
Thao stomped back towards the pulley rigs. He knew what he had to do, and he didn’t need one of the overseers to tell him.
‘Shut down the hoists!’ he shouted, pointing at the machines spooling cable and chains. Down at the other end of those chains, containers of mined rock and crystal were rising from the depths in cages and cradles.
He could hear the chant, its beat growing and growing. A warning light flicked amber on one of the machines – a hoist was almost at the top. His gang were looking at him, confusion and fear blinking from their wide eyes.
‘Shut it down!’ Thao shouted again.
‘Alpha to omega!’ shouted Unt from beside him. The new ganger had followed Thao across the gantry. Thao turned and looked at Unt. Something was wrong. The ganger did not look confused; his dust-caked face seemed calm, almost serene. ‘That’s what they are chanting. Not halfar to mag. Alpha to omega – beginning to end.’
‘What are you saying?’ snarled Thao. ‘Get moving, and shut down the hoist.’
Unt stepped closer, and Thao noticed the rest of the gang frantically scrabbling at the pulley machines. The cable kept on spooling onto the drum. Out on one of the gantries across the pit, a squad of overseers opened up with tripod-mounted guns. Lines of stubber rounds breathed down into the dark. And now he could hear the words that Unt had spoken boiling up louder than anything he had ever heard.
‘Alpha to omega! Alpha to omega! Alpha to omega!’
The light on the pulley machines flicked to green. The top of the hoist came level with the gantry. He saw the curve of power armour and the gleam of light on lacquered plate, on huge figures standing on the hoist platform. Glowing green eyes turned to look at him. He saw the dark shine of boltguns, and an impossible name formed in his skull: Legiones Astartes...
A clank of pistons came from close behind him, but he could not move. He looked down. Hydraulic fluid was glistening as it ran down his rig. Thao had a second to see Unt’s calm face as the ganger gripped him, twisted and flung him over the edge of the gantry.
He fell, tumbling end over end past a streaked blur of gunfire and flame, the words rising to meet him.
‘Alpha to omega! Alpha to omega! Alpha to omega!’
Satellite munitions fortress Kadal
Jupiter close orbit
Magos Sec-Lo-65 emerged from his subroutine immersion as the warning signals chimed through his control room. A residual flesh instinct to blink became a clicking whir of focusing rings in his eyes. He listened to the warning chime, swallowing and digesting its tonal code. It was a sensor error alarm rather than a full alert. Sec-Lo-65 sighed a stream of imperfect code. The errors in the security system had been occurring for the last few days. Doors and sensors had been giving false returns, or shutting down at random. There was a malady in the machine-spirits, but no matter what he did he had not been able to purge the affliction. That alone was vexing. That the error was occurring in the control system in one of Jupiter’s major munitions magazines was a cause of greater disquiet.
The Kadal munitions fortress was one of the primary reserves of fleet ordnance in the system. A lump of ultra-hard ore, it had taken the Mechanicum two decades to excavate, and another decade to graft the fortress structures into its insides. Nova shells, torpedo warheads, macro shells, propellant and explosive precursors, all lay in vibration and temperature-controlled dark at the core of the rock. When a ship needed rearming it would approach and hold anchor away from Kadal. Barges would then shuttle the munitions load out and return. Nothing and no one approached closer than several thousand kilometres; anything that tried to come closer would be greeted by Kadal’s formidable defences. When dealing with enough destructive material to crack open a moon, there were no acceptable risks.
Sec-Lo-65 disengaged himself from his data cradle. Cables snapped free of his skull. The bionic tentacles that had taken the place of his legs flexed across the floor, and he glided towards the door. He was going to have to convene a data conclave of all his subordinates. The next days were going to be filled with code dissections and purifications.
He reached the door and murmured his clearance command, and the layers of plasteel peeled back.
He moved forwards, and stopped, eyes spinning as they focused on the figures standing in the corridor.
His eyes whirred as they focused on the figure standing behind Beta-42-8. Pattern processors bonded to Sec-Lo-65’s brain outran his thoughts, flooding his awareness with details: Legiones Astartes, power armour of the Third Mark, with modifications for heat and energy baffling, deep indigo lacquer, micro impacts consistent with abrasion by interstellar dust. Surprise followed all of these observations, and shock flooded the remainder of his biological components.
A tiny scrap of brain material and intellect circuitry was still processing Magos Sec-Lo-65’s last thought ten minutes later as his blood and machine oil was pooling on the control room’s floor.
<...omega... end... terminus... omega... end...>
He had no senses left to see a lone shuttle break free of a launch bay and boost for the open void.
Ten minutes after his last thought flickered to static and emptiness, the facility exploded with the shock and light of an entire void war compressed into a microsecond.
The Solar System
The warning message burned across the Solar System. In the Whispering Tower in the City of Sight, the great choir of astropaths shouted out in a hundred synchronised howls of imagination. The word raced out, travelling at the speed of thought. On hundreds of ships and orbital fortresses, astropaths woke from their trances and spoke their message. But even as the alarm flowed out, it found the Solar System already in chaos.
In the orbits of Mars, contradictory alerts and orders spread through vox-channels. Firing orders were given and countermanded. Auspex failed on a dozen ships. A pair of monitor craft fired on each other, their sensors seeing enemy targets. Fire stained the dark above the Red Planet.
In the sphere of Jupiter, the explosion of munitions fortress Kadal shone brighter than the sun.
In the Sheol Forge Fortress above Saturn, a techno-virus spread through the controls of a thousand automata. The robots tore apart the facility they guarded.
On and on the confusion and strife spread. It spread in the riots that boiled up in the moon colonies of Neptune. It shone in the flames of a dozen ships set ablaze as they mistook each other for enemies. It sang in signals and words and images that told of armies rising from the dark, and fire falling from the skies. It spread in an eye blink, eating the truth and hiding lies in the smoke of its passing.
And with it went the truth that gave every lie power: that the enemy had come at last to the gates of Terra.
The Alpha Legion spring their surprise assault
Two
Warship Lachrymae
Trans-Plutonian region
The ships came from the night in a ragged cloud. They were the skeletons and carcasses of warships, their flanks gouged by asteroid impacts, haloed by leaking
atmosphere. From Pluto’s orbit the fires of their engines appeared one at a time. On the bridge of the Lachrymae, Sigismund watched the pict-feed of the approaching fleet and looked at Boreas.
‘Signal the fleets into position,’ said Sigismund.
Boreas nodded at the data hanging in curtains of holo-light above the command platform.
‘It is a large formation,’ said Boreas. The Templar champion’s pale face was set, the features hardened around his eyes. ‘Fifty vessels at least, warships too – damaged but still active. We are reading power in the weapons, but it is difficult to get a clear reading. There is a lot of moving debris out there at the moment.’
Sigismund shrugged, conceding the point. The Solar System was never entirely empty. Shoals of broken rock and ice tumbled though the void on millennia-old journeys. Added to which Pluto dragged belts of refuse with it as it circled Sol: husks of ships and stations that had been dead for hundreds or even thousands of years.
‘They could be survivors from a storm,’ said Sigismund.
‘Or another attack fleet...’ said Boreas.
‘Indeed so,’ said Sigismund without moving his gaze from the pict-feed.
This latest vomiting from the warp was bearing down on Pluto. Between the outer planet and the abyss spun its moons: Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra. The smaller moons were little larger than the biggest warships. Warrens of tunnels and bunkers cut through their rock and ice.
Hydra sat furthest from Pluto. While her sibling moons were fortresses, she was little more than a shell around a core of reactors. Those reactors powered equally vast signal and sensor arrays. From Hydra the watchers on the Solar System’s outer sphere could see far and coordinate the firing and signalling of all the rest. Of those others, Kerberos stood apart in another way. Clad in steel and weapons, she watched over the void with enough firepower to break a battlefleet. The name Kerberos was an echo of a tale which told of a three-headed hound that stood at the gates of death. Sigismund could not think of a more appropriate title. Together, Pluto and its moons were a fortress on the edge of the abyss. One day the last battle of the Imperium would begin, and on that day Pluto would be the first wall against which the attackers broke.
