by David Guymer
The Cerebrium overlooked the Palace roofscape from the heights of Widdershins Tower, atmospheric and orbital craft crisscrossing the fortress skyline. Tech-crews hung in cradles from deltaform lifters in the mottled khaki of the Departmento Munitorum, servicing defensive installations that had not experienced proper maintenance since the last great programme of rebuilding instigated by Roboute Guilliman in the aftermath of the Siege. Pot-bellied troop transports shipped in Astra Militarum regiments from Triton, Ganymede, Venus, and from training bases throughout the system. Shining like a lake under sunlight undiminished by any semblance of an ozone barrier, armour units massed in the thousand-hectare rockcrete square of the Fields of Winged Victory. Lastan Neemagiun Veritus, the Inquisitorial Representative, had told him that the Emperor Himself had watched Horus Lupercal’s first landing boats come down from this very spot.
Koorland certainly felt something from the ancient Albian oak panelling and book-lined shelves. Power. Responsibility. An almost spiritual bond to his genetic heritage. But he had selected the room as his private study in large part for the view, an instinctual desire to take and hold the high ground.
Drakan Vangorich stood patiently, hands curled over the back of one of the twelve chairs tucked under the table, eyes narrowed against the sunlight streaming through the open shutters.
‘How long have you had this recording?’ Koorland asked.
‘Moments. I brought it to you as soon as I received it, lord.’
‘Your expediency is appreciated.’
‘I trusted you to do the right thing with it.’
‘Is there any more?’
‘What I know, you’ve just seen.’
Koorland clenched his jaw. If the recording had divulged the location of the orks then for the sake of unity he would have contented himself with that, and put the Adeptus Mechanicus’ actions down to simple heel-dragging. He would have dealt with them later, content in the knowledge that there might be a later. Now, that deal was off.
‘Is the Fabricator General still in the Palace?’
‘I believe that his personal shuttle departed from Daylight space port with his entourage about,’ Vangorich smiled thinly, ‘moments ago.’
Koorland sat back and scooped up another slate. It was one that he had already read and memorised earlier in the day, the sort of detail to which the human High Lords had likely never devoted themselves. He looked through it, thinking, without needing to read it again.
‘Some good news?’ asked Vangorich.
‘Astropath logs from Oort Base. Alcazar Remembered translated into the system two hours and fifteen minutes ago, immediately relaying a request to Mars for docking codes and emergency repair. A request that one hour and three minutes ago was granted with a berth cleared for them at Demus Manus port in the orbital ring. You have more than this one operative on Mars, I presume?’
Vangorich hesitated a moment.
‘Yes.’
‘Then activate them,’ said Koorland, tossing the data-slate into the pile. The Adeptus Mechanicus would give up the location of the Beast, one way or the other.
Mars – Pavonis Mons
Urquidex pounded his hands against the keypad and screamed into the receiver. The terminal was dead, remotely powered down. He bashed the keypad like an infant who had lost patience with a screen-locked data-slate and cried out in frustration. They had been so close. He spun around at the sound of a roughly human-sized metallic object hitting the floor, and flinched back against the console.
Clementina Yendl struck the attacking skitarii like a flurry of las.
The robes of her disguise made a whip-like crack with every punch and kick, and five augmented warriors were already down. Number six dropped, neck twisted around until it snapped, and she leapt over him, sliding her foot between the legs of the unit alpha as he swung a spitting taser goad. A flick of the knee sent the skitarii alpha crashing down. His weapon skittered across the floor. Yendl was already up, hooking the other leg over his shoulder and punching his arm in half at the elbow.
The alpha gave a vox-synth shriek.
With a glance over her shoulder, she ripped off her rebreather mask and took out a charging skitarius with a discus throw. Long braids of greying hair tumbled free. Blood trickled down her face from the mask’s intramuscular attachment sites. Her eyes burned with a destructive focus.
A bolt from her arc pistol sent a red-robed skitarius shivering to his knees with blue-white tendrils of electricity coursing through his body. A cyborg soldier ran at her with the stock of his rad-carbine raised like a club. She turned it on the angle of her forearm, took it from him, then spun on her knees and gutted the skitarius with a swipe of her manipulator arm. Bile and battery acid jetted from his midriff in an arc as he was spun aside.
Urquidex had never seen anything like the Assassin in his life.
An entire squad of skitarii vanguard, the techno-elite of Mars, and she had dispatched them in the time it had taken him to turn around. He almost dared to believe that they would make it to her ship and off-world after all. Almost. His mind didn’t even have the time to trigger the necessary endorphin release to let him feel it.
A stream of hyper-velocity white phosphor burned up the space where Yendl was standing. Indiscriminate shot melted through the corridor walls, the floor around her and the ceiling above. One incandescent missile punched through the right side of her chest and shattered the console. Metal and plastek erupted into white fire. Urquidex dropped to the ground, screaming, bringing up his digitool to protect his face.
Even to his own ears, his screams were nothing compared to Yendl’s.
The wound in her chest sizzled. Molten fat dribbled. She beat madly at the chemical fire and threw herself against the wall, pink smoke billowing from her mouth until her lungs were gone and there were no more screams. She flopped to the ground, eyes horrifically wide, twitching like a tortured fish.
Several seconds of agony later, Clementina Yendl died.
Through optics smeared with flesh vapour, Urquidex watched the immense cyborgised construct that had killed her rumble into view. A Kataphron Destroyer. It grumbled forward on a pair of huge tracks, the amputated head and torso of an armour-plated battle servitor providing the basic neural guidance it needed to move and kill. Its eyes were dull, mindless, its lips sutured into a rictus grimace of unfelt pleasure. The heavy weaponry grafted to the stumps of its arms pivoted from Yendl’s smouldering corpse to Urquidex.
The magos narrowed his optic apertures and pleaded with the Omnissiah for a swifter end.
‘Not him.’
The Kataphron growled to a halt and from behind it, gliding under a stinging swarm of mechadendrites, came Artisan Trajectorae Van Auken. As always, Urquidex found himself cowed by the adept without the need for anything so evolved as words or threats. He looked furious, the physical embodiment of machine power. A squad of skitarii vanguard marched in lockstep to his extended stride, red-robed, the arisen shades of the comrades they uncaringly stepped across. Their eyes glowed like coals behind their steel masks.
‘You disappoint me, magos,’ the artisan trajectorae sneered, his servo-harness adding its own snapping words of contempt. ‘You will never know how much.’
From somewhere, Urquidex found the courage to stand.
‘The soul is the conscience of sentience.’
‘The Tenth Universal Law,’ said Van Auken. ‘The misinterpretation of the Omnissiah’s wisdom is a common failing amongst the Adeptus Biologis, and no excuse for treason against the blessed machine.’
With a brusque flick of a mechadendrite, the artisan trajectorae summoned the skitarii. They surged forward. Two claimed Urquidex by either arm and pinned him back over the still-sputtering console. He could feel the heat against his back, then on his face as an augmeticised hand pushed the side of his head into the plastek.
‘The Imperium
will be coming,’ he hissed through the metallic fingers covering his mouth.
A smile parted the artisan trajectorae’s Neanderthal jaw.
‘Magos Biologis Eldon Urquidex, the Adeptus Mechanicus sentences you to servitude imperpetuis. I will personally ensure that only the very heaviest of armaments be grafted to whatever the metasurgeons deign to leave of you. It would be undesirable for your body to perish too swiftly.’
Urquidex struggled against the augmetised grips that restrained him, screaming for the clemency of white phosphor. Van Auken glided back.
‘You have done nothing but accelerate an outcome considered inevitable since the inception of the Grand Experiment. The Imperium will come, and they will not find the legions of Mars unprepared.’
Somehow, Urquidex’s struggles freed an arm.
He lashed his digitools across the throat of the skitarius holding his other arm. Blood splashed his rebreather, and for a moment he was free. He spun around, screaming into the vid-recorder as cold hands dragged him away by his robes.
‘Ullanor! The Beast arises on Ullanor!’
About the Author
David Guymer is the author of the Gotrek & Felix novels Slayer, Kinslayer and City of the Damned, along with the novella Thorgrim and a plethora of short stories set in the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding, and was a finalist in the 2014 David Gemmell Legend Awards for his novel Headtaker.
An extract from Sanctus Reach.
Time stretched into the distant future above, banded in the streaked black stone of Obstiria, reaching through another ten thousand years of war to the end of everything. There the Emperor waited, flanked by the billions of warriors who had fallen in His name, to vanquish the Great Enemy in the culmination of all battles.
Below, the past rolled out into the darkness, falling down to Obstiria’s core through millennia of past glories and tragedies. Through the Altigenos Purges and the Black Crusades of the Arch-Traitor, the Age of Apostasy and the hellish vistas of the Scouring. There lay the Great Crusade and the Great Heresy, the crumbling obscurity of times that lay before the coming of the Emperor. The Age of Strife boiled like a river of black blood at the nadir of time, rushing over the forgotten horrors of the Dark Age of Technology.
Mighty heroes stood astride the burning worlds of myth. First amongst them was the Emperor Himself, the beginning and the end of all history, His face hidden by the glare of His divinity. His son, the Primarch Guilliman, bearing the weight of the Imperium on his shoulders. Fulminos, the greatest Obsidian Glaive who had ever walked the galaxy, echoed the image of Guilliman as he struck down alien, daemon and heretic with his blade of black glass.
Brother Molkis saw from the beginning to the end. The Obsidian Glaives were not just an army, not even just a Space Marine Chapter. They were a pillar of the history of mankind, forged by the will of the Emperor to bear up the shield that staved off the extinction of the human race. All their glories, past and present, spun around Molkis at a thousand years a moment.
He could see it all, from the Great Crusade and the Heresy to the Age of Imperium and the founding of the Obsidian Glaives Chapter, through the endless wars to defend humanity and on to the future. Those myths that had their origins in the prehistory of the Imperium ran on through the present, that arbitrary point where Molkis himself stood, and on until the end. It was a comfort to Molkis, who had fought in those wars, to know the victories that he had bled for would roll on until the end of time.
Then he saw his hands. The hand that had held his chainsword and his bolter were gone. They were ugly masses of metal, painted black and pitted with old battle scars. One was a cylindrical power fist, four fingers radiating out, powered by pistons to seize and crush. The other ended in a pair of lascannon barrels. Not hands at all, but the weapons of a war machine.
His body was not his body, but the massive body of that machine. A power plant thudded its slow rhythm behind him. His eyes were not eyes but the lenses of picters mounted on the front of his hull, transmitting flickering images through his optic nerves.
And around him was not the endless vista of his Chapter’s history but dark and dismal cloisters, with a vaulted ceiling overhead and implements of incarceration and punishment on the walls. Manacles hung alongside thumbscrews and paring blades. On the ceiling was mounted a full-length body harness of spiked iron bands, a testament to endless suffering.
Someone was speaking. Molkis looked down and felt his whole body tilt, a tank-sized sarcophagus clad in ceramite. He saw his massive steel feet against the cracked flagstones of the cloisters, and the enormous shadow he cast in the light of the torches burning on the pillars.
A Space Marine Scout stood beside Molkis – an Obsidian Glaive, his demi-armour in the black and bone of the Chapter. He was young, midway through his transformation into a full Space Marine, the surgical scars still pink against the skin of his face and scalp.
‘Molkis!’ repeated the Scout. ‘Brother Molkis, come back to us! The time has come to fight!’
Molkis felt connections sparking in the back of his mind, accessing the data-medium stored in his sarcophagus. The name ‘Desaan’ was projected onto his consciousness. This Scout was named Desaan. Brother Desaan of the Tenth Company.
‘Are you with us, Brother Molkis?’ continued Desaan. ‘We need you now. Of all times, of all battles, we need you now.’
Molkis’s picters scanned around. The data-medium told him he was in the Penumbral Spike, in the Cloisters of the Bold, where the cold of the earth met the heat of Obstiria’s core. Below were the generatoria and forges, and above were the sparring halls and cell blocks. He had once walked these halls, marching alongside his brothers. Now this machine walked in his place – this Dreadnought, this war machine in which he was the pilot.
‘I am with you,’ said Brother Molkis.
‘Do you remember?’ asked Desaan.
‘Remember?’
‘You are Brother Molkis of the Fourth Company,’ said Desaan. ‘You fell to the Kraken at Devilin Reach. You were wounded but the Apothecaries stayed your death, and you were mounted in this Dreadnought. Do you remember?’
Flickers of pain burst at the back of Molkis’s memory. He remembered a tide of monstrous flesh, and the chill of a bony blade spearing through him. He remembered the cold of the blood draining from his body.
‘Yes,’ said Molkis. ‘I remember.’
‘Good,’ said Desaan, with obvious relief. Molkis realised that Desaan had gone through this same conversation many times. ‘War has come, my brother. We need you at the front line, on the battlements.’
‘But we are at Penumbral Spike,’ said Molkis, ‘on Obstiria. We are not at war. This is our fortress-monastery, where we are inviolable. Or do I remember wrongly, Brother Desaan?’
‘You remember right,’ said Desaan. ‘Obstiria is invaded. The Penumbral Spike is besieged. The greenskins are here.’
The Penumbral Spike shuddered, slabs of black stone tumbling down its vertical sides. The irradiated rocky valleys around it shuddered too, momentarily as fluid as water. The lesser peaks around the Spike shed their caps of caked grey ash and new raw gashes opened up in the ground.
One of the peaks was punctured by a dozen explosions, throwing black plumes of pulverised rock into the sky. The mountain collapsed, millions of tonnes of rock plummeting into the mountain’s roots. Rockslides flooded the valleys with rushing waves of stone. Another peak went down a moment later, closer this time, the deep thud of the explosions shaking the Penumbral Spike as if by a giant hand. In a few moments the craze of valleys and crevasses had changed, the map around the Obsidian Glaives fortress-monastery rewritten.
Augmented eyes were just able to make out the ramshackle halftracks and warbikes tossed end over end by the landslide, the tanks swallowed by the dark earth, the greenskins fleei
ng before the collapse.
On the battlements halfway up the Spike, beside one of the fortress’s turbolaser emplacements, a cadre of Space Marines looked down at the changing landscape. Chapter Master Midnias was one, his black armour edged in gold, with a purple cloak over one shoulder and the spiked silver crown of Obstiria on his brow. He was the lord of this planet, though only the Obsidian Glaives lived there. It was his planet being mutilated below. The captains of the Fourth, Sixth, Ninth and Tenth companies stood alongside him. The Captain of the Tenth, Terundel, the Master of Novices, wore an ornate version of the Scout armour worn by the recruits who fought beneath him. Also with the group was Techmarine Javan, his armour in red, his face half steel and one eye replaced with a set of overlapping crimson lenses.
‘Mount Scalen did not fall,’ said Midnias.
‘The charges were laid more than a thousand years ago,’ replied Javan. ‘Truth be told, I am surprised any of them fired.’
‘Then you have done well, Brother Javan,’ said Midnias. ‘That will slow them down.’
‘Not by much,’ said Captain Elhalil of the Sixth. ‘Days, my lord. Not months.’
‘Then we will take the days we are given,’ said Midnias. ‘Do not be so quick to see defeat, captain. Not every turn of the tide is to be greeted with such ill humour. Greenskins lie dead. Rejoice in that.’
Terundel stood up on the battlement and lifted a magnocular to his eye. The dust below still billowed but the deepest of it was clearing from the valleys outlying the destruction.
‘Their vanguard has tested us enough,’ said the Scout-captain. ‘Their patience has been used up. They attack in force. See?’
Midnias took the magnocular and followed Terundel’s outstretched finger. Through one valley streamed an armoured wedge of tanks, a collection of treaded and wheeled vehicles with no uniformity of order. Some were bolted together apparently from junk, with crude and violent symbology daubed on their armour plates. Others had been Imperial tanks, refitted, upgunned and driven recklessly into battle. Midnias counted two hundred of them with the first glance, half as many again with a second at another valley winding between the low peaks that formed the Nineteen Sisters. Hordes of orks on foot ran alongside them, trying to keep up with the bikes and halftracks that raced ahead.
