He passed through the gates of the Wall. He would meet the ship, and whatever news it brought.
The space port was not far beyond the Daylight Wall, and was visible from the High Gardens. It was reserved for high dignitaries from other systems and could accommodate a handful of lighters at a time. The Militant Fire, though a small merchant ship, was large for the space. When it arrived, Vangorich watched with approval as its pilot dropped the vessel between the spires of the Imperial Palace with an assured precision. Retro-rockets extinguished, exhaust from the descent dissipating into the grimy air of the palace, the ship sat in gathering silence for several minutes before a door rose on the port side of nose. A staircase descended. Then nothing more for a few minutes. The Lucifer Blacks’ rifles were trained on the dark entranceway.
The figure that at last appeared was human enough. The man’s clothes were expensive, though his coat was torn now. His face was grey with exhaustion and fear. He raised his arms over his head. ‘My name is Leander Narkissos,’ he said. ‘Captain of the Militant Fire. Please don’t shoot. No one on the ship is armed.’ He waited, looking like a man who didn’t particularly care if he was gunned down.
Vangorich walked forward on the landing pad and joined the commanding officer of the Lucifer Blacks. ‘What is your name, captain?’
‘Mercado, Grand Master.’
‘The situation is tense, I know, and so are your troops. Unthinking fire is the last thing we need at this juncture, don’t you agree?’ He kept his voice calm, his tone light.
Mercado nodded. ‘Hold fire,’ he shouted. ‘Weapons down, but keep them ready.’
‘Come down,’ Vangorich called to Narkissos, and he advanced until he was a few metres away from the base of the steps, visible to all the nervous soldiers.
Narkissos lowered his arms and took the stairs slowly. He wobbled when he reached the landing pad.
Vangorich stepped forward and steadied him. ‘Did you escape?’ he asked.
‘No.’ Narkissos looked back up at the doorway. ‘They want to be escorted to the Senatorum.’
Vangorich followed his gaze. He almost asked, Who? but he knew the answer. Beneath the denial that even he maintained for the sake of his sanity, he had known since the ship’s approach was first detected.
Three orks appeared. They descended the steps, and then they were there, on the landing pad, on Terra, near the heart of the Imperial Palace. Vangorich was not religious, yet his stomach turned at the obscenity of the greenskins’ presence.
He fought down his atavistic response. He shouted ‘Hold your fire!’ because the Lucifer Blacks would need to hear that command again. He forced himself to examine the orks so he, at least, might have some rational understanding of the Imperium’s foe. He already knew he would be one of the few, apart from Kubik, to be capable of clear thought, and he didn’t trust the Fabricator General to be candid with his insights.
Vangorich had studied all the reports the Mechanicus had made available about the resurgent orks. He had also read more than a few documents that the cult of the Omnissiah had preferred to keep to itself. One of the recurring themes of the studies, which the Mechanicus emphasised with undisguised enthusiasm, was novelty. These orks kept producing new weapons, acting in new ways. The pattern continued now. Vangorich looked at the orks before him, and felt another unwelcome shock of the new. All three were big. Two of them were a full head taller than he was. The third was half again as large. A leader and two subordinates, then. They wore thick leather, decorated with the brutal signs of the ork clans. The clothing seemed more like robes of office than armour.
What alarmed Vangorich most was not the unusual garb, though, but what the orks did not have.
They were unarmed.
Vangorich stared at this impossibility. The leader held a staff. It was three metres long, made of iron. Its girth was decorated with clusters of skulls. Some were human, others eldar, and many from species Vangorich didn’t recognise. The skulls were iron also, their jaws agape in an agony of death. Real teeth hung from a coil of wire that spiralled the length of the staff. The crown was a representation of an ork face, snarling in victory and hunger. The staff was formidable, but it was not a weapon. By the standards of what Vangorich knew about the greenskins, it was an artistic masterpiece.
The orks watched him steadily. They were calm, motionless, and so even more disturbing.
All it would take on his part was a simple gesture. He could turn his head, nod at Mercado, and the orks would be gunned down.
The consequences of that choice, he knew, would not be pleasant.
‘Follow me,’ he said to Narkissos.
The Lucifer Blacks followed. He led a dark procession to the Great Chamber. Vangorich was conscious of every heavy step of the orks behind him. Xenos boots on Terran marble beat the rhythm of the Imperium’s humiliation, and of the craven failure of the High Lords. He counted himself among the guilty. What did he have to show for his machinations? Playing host to the invader.
Narkissos walked like a man approaching his execution.
‘Tell me who they are,’ Vangorich said.
The trader whispered a terrible word. ‘Ambassadors.’
‘That isn’t possible.’
‘I know.’
So it was true, then. Vangorich felt colder inside with every passing moment.
Their arrival in the Great Chamber was greeted by a collective gasp followed by a growing murmur of rage. Udo rose from his seat. He pointed at Narkissos.
‘What have you brought into this sacred place?’ he thundered.
There was no threat in his bluster. He was an empty gesture given embodiment. Narkissos didn’t flinch. He didn’t even look at the Lord Commander. His eyes were unfocused. He was staring at something more vivid and frightening than the High Lords or the orks. A recent memory, perhaps, or a vision of the near future.
‘They’re ambassadors,’ Vangorich said, the word alien in his mouth. He mounted the dais. The orks remained where they were. Their yellow, sunken eyes watched the High Lords. ‘Are you their interpreter?’ he asked Narkissos, wondering how the man had come to know the xenos tongue.
Narkissos looked up now. He shook his head, miserable.
‘Don’t need an interpreter,’ the lead ork said. ‘We tell you how to surrender, you surrender. Easy.’
Eighteen
Terra – the Imperial Palace
The silence was as huge as the great scream had been. The scream had been the one response possible to the immensity of the moon’s arrival. The silence was the one response possible to a few simple words. The earth did not shake. Walls did not topple. Yet it seemed to Vangorich that both events occurred with every syllable that came from the ork’s mouth. Everything that the Imperium believed about the orks was wrong. The mere existence of these new orks, these ambassadors, was a blow whose implications were at least as great as the annihilation of the Proletarian Crusade. Here was proof that the military catastrophe was due to something more than brute power. The orks had numbers, and they had technology, and at least some of them had become a new thing.
Before the dreadful wonder of an ork dictating terms in fluent Gothic, what response could there be except silence? What emotion other than despair?
The ork had a name: Bezhrak. His Gothic was guttural. It sounded like the evisceration of prey. But there was no hesitation. Vangorich realised, to his horror, that Bezhrak spoke not as if he had learned the language of the Imperium, but as if it were his native tongue. The ork’s expression was uncultured, and the fact that word even occurred to Vangorich was obscene. Bezhrak spoke as if he had spawned from a deep underhive.
‘The Great Beast has you by the guts,’ he said. ‘Struggle, he’ll rip ’em out. Surrender, you get to keep ’em.’
The silence stretched on.
Bezhrak looked around the Great Chamber. ‘So?’ he as
ked. ‘Give up or die. Choose.’
The silence broke. The tiers erupted with screams, curses, wails of defiance and wails of despair. There were prayers to the God-Emperor, and there were what sounded to Vangorich like treasonous pleas for mercy directed at the orks. He tuned out the wider Senatorum. He was surrounded by enough idiocy on the High Lords’ dais.
Mesring turned on Tull. ‘What have you done?’ he screamed at her. ‘You have brought sacrilege into our midst. Holy Terra is defiled!’
‘I didn’t hear you voicing doubts earlier,’ she retorted. She had regained some of her fire. She was in Mesring’s face, giving no quarter, and standing with her back to the orks, as if she could erase the reality of their presence in a contest of rage with the Ecclesiarch.
Ekharth, Gibran, Sark and Anwar surrounded Verreault.
‘Why are you silent?’ Gibran asked, his voice rasping with hysteria. ‘Give the orders! Kill the abominations!’
‘The Lucifer Blacks outnumber them!’ Sark sounded no better. ‘They aren’t armed!’
‘And what does that tell you?’ said Verreault.
That they’re throwing our civilisation in our face, Vangorich thought. The self-inflicted moral wound the Imperium would suffer if it acted with less sophistication than orks would be a septic one.
The Master of the Astronomican was not worried about such concerns. ‘Kill them!’ Sark screamed. ‘Kill them!’
Bezhrak grinned at him. ‘Bad plan, little bug.’
Sark paled. He sank back to his seat, trembling.
The Lucifer Blacks’ rifles were still trained on the orks. The troopers’ faces were strained masks of hatred. They did not fire. Verreault held up a hand, ensuring they did not.
‘If we kill them, we sign our death warrants,’ he said.
Udo sought refuge in bluster.
‘We will not surrender!’ he shouted at Bezhrak. ‘We will annihilate your foul race. You have sealed your doom by coming here. You have…’ he trailed off, seeking a greater curse. ‘You will regret…’ he began again, and stopped again, held by Bezhrak’s gaze. ‘I won’t!’ he yelled. ‘We won’t! You can’t ever!’ He descended into an incoherence of defiance. He was pathetic, Vangorich thought. Before long, he wouldn’t even be howling words.
Kubik had advanced to the edge of the dais and was walking back and forth in front of the orks. He leaned forward, his telescopic vision lenses extending towards the trio. He was speaking quickly to himself. Vangorich doubted the Fabricator General experienced emotion in a recognisable sense. But there was something very like excitement in the flood of auto-dictation and binary. ‘Not a clan. Specialised evolution is a defining characteristic of the Veridi giganticus. An ambassador class? An ambassador species? That might be closer. Yes, yes. Not learned behaviour. Diplomatic skills as genetic trait? Unprecedented. Specimen collection will be needed. And the potential. If the Veridi are capable of this form of development, mutations on command, the possibilities are–’
‘Where are your loyalties, priest of Mars?’ Veritus asked.
Kubik’s neck twitched. He waved a multi-jointed hand, brushing away the irritation of the inquisitor’s voice. He chattered in cant, already lost again in his speculations.
‘Enough, then,’ Veritus said. ‘Bear witness, Father of Mankind,’ he called out. ‘I have tried. But they leave me no choice.’ He stepped down from the dais. In his power armour, he was almost as wide as Bezhrak’s attendants. He brushed past the orks and began the long walk out of the Great Chamber.
Vangorich watched him go. When he dropped his eyes from Veritus’ retreating figure, he met Bezhrak’s gaze. There he saw something that chilled him even more than the ork’s use of Gothic: contempt. The two smaller orks were amused. They were grinning their disdain for the shrieking puppets on the dais. Bezhrak wasn’t smiling. Vangorich didn’t trust his ability to read ork physiognomy. He didn’t want to trust it. He wanted to be wrong. Because Bezhrak’s contempt appeared to be mixed with pity, and if that were true, what then?
What then?
Bezhrak raised his staff and brought it down against the marble floor. The reverberation was the toll of war. It brought a momentary silence to the dais. The High Lords faced the reality of their disgusted foe.
‘Useless,’ Bezhrak said. ‘Worse than snotlings.’ He looked at his fellows. ‘No reasoning with humans. Break ’em, kill ’em, eat ’em. That’s good. Don’t try to make ’em think. Can’t be done.’ He shrugged. He turned back to the High Lords. ‘Want to die, then? Last chance.’
The Twelve said nothing. Vangorich opened his mouth, and found he also had nothing to say. He had almost responded to an impulse to save face before the orks, and acting on that impulse would have been its own shame. And Udo was right, in his idiot blathering. There would be no surrender. There could be no negotiation. Before the ork that spoke, there could be no words.
Bezhrak gave him a long look, then nodded. ‘So die,’ he said. He brought the staff down again with a slam of judgement. He stood still and quiet, the fearsome focus of the Great Chamber.
Vangorich stared at the beast who had come to the heart of the Imperium and been repelled by the animals there. An ork had become the figure of dignity and, worse still, of majesty in humanity’s parliament. With all honour dead, how was it possible that the ground did not open up and swallow the Palace?
To Narkissos, Bezhrak said, ‘Done here.’
With Narkissos trailing them, the orks turned their backs on the High Lords of Terra. In their wake, the new silence continued. It was deep and painful as a terminal wound, but it didn’t last. Words like blood poured from it, as the Lords turned on each other again.
We deserve it, Vangorich thought. The enormous, lethal, infinite foolishness of the human race shook the chamber and fell on his soul with the weight of a collapsing civilisation. We deserve it, he thought again.
He wasn’t sure how long he stood there, staring at nothing, deafened by hopelessness. But he shook off the despair. He cast it away with a refrain. I will fight, he thought. I will fight.
I will fight.
He looked up. The orks were gone. So was the point of the Senatorum. There was nothing he could do here. There was nothing anyone could do here.
He wondered where Veritus had gone.
He had taken ten steps away from the dais when the explosion hit. It came from below. The floor of the Great Chamber shook and cracked. Tiers collapsed. The Imperium’s futile dignitaries tumbled over each other in a human cascade. Tocsins competed with panicked screams. Vangorich ran towards the exit of the Great Chamber, where he saw Mercado yelling into a vox-handset. The captain looked up as Vangorich drew near. He lowered the vox-set. He was handling it as if it had bitten him.
‘Is it the orks?’ he asked. Had they somehow inserted a bomb beneath the Palace? Had he given them the opportunity to do so?
‘No, Grand Master,’ Mercado said. His voice was disbelieving. ‘It’s the eldar.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Annandale is the author of The Horus Heresy novel The Damnation of Pythos. He also writes the Yarrick series, consisting of the novella Chains of Golgotha and the novel Imperial Creed and The Pyres of Armageddon. For Space Marine Battles he has written The Death of Antagonis and Overfiend. He is a prolific writer of short fiction, including the novella Mephiston: Lord of Death and numerous short stories set in The Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000 universes. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.
An extract from The Death of Antagonis.
The Wars of Lamentation did not come to Elias Tennesyn in the person of the Dragon or the Gorgon. Those figures would come later. Visited upon him by the Wars, they would, for his sins, drag him through the hellscape of what had once been his life’s work. But if they were the avatars of war, they were not its herald.
That role (and oh, by the Throne, had Tennesyn only known it) fell to a man whose smile told a tale of a soul eternally surprised by joy.
The herald was called Cardinal Rodrigo Nessun. Though he wore a gold medallion in the shape of a wide, almost circular eye suspended over the hilt of a sword, his robes had none of the adornment Tennesyn would have expected of a senior ecclesiarch. Instead, they were a blinding, quasar white, and their every fold winked, their every billow laughed. The movements of the clothing were the reflections of the man’s pale blue eyes, eyes whose sparkle was a flourish of delight in the universe. His hair was as white as his robes. There were moments when Tennesyn couldn’t distinguish one from the other, as if the hair that fell in a thick cascade down Nessun’s back spread and shaped itself into vestments. The cardinal’s skin was white, too, a beyond-albino chalk. He could have been a ghost, and he did, it was true, seem to walk a few centimetres off the ground. He could have been a ghost, but he was much too happy.
And on the day the Wars of Lamentation began in the Phlagia system, on the planet Antagonis, Nessun wasn’t just floating. He was dancing. Tennesyn’s mood was darker. The xeno-archaeologist was happy that his sponsor was pleased. But now, on the very day that the dig site seemed bound to validate his theories, Tennesyn was having to rush off back to Aighe Mortis in the neighbouring Camargus system. Another of his best researchers was being conscripted into the Imperial Guard. It was the third time in a week. Tennesyn had no quarrel with duty to the Emperor, but there were different ways to serve, and how was he supposed to do any work of real value if his staff kept being poached by the Departmento Munitorum? If Tennesyn wanted to reach Aighe Mortis before his protégé was bundled off-world, no doubt to die fighting over a rise of rock that no one could possibly be interested in were it not for the other people who couldn’t possibly be interested in it, then he had to leave, and right away.
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