Ruinstorm

by David Annandale

  What you have created, you must not destroy.

  The instinct was imperative. The herald had a significance that Sanguinius could not see yet. The role was needed. There was something in it he had created that was pure, that was the best of what the Blood Angels could be.

  ‘Let us strike forth to Terra,’ Sanguinius pronounced, and the power of his voice made the walls of the bridge thrum. ‘Shipmaster,’ he said to Carminus, ‘signal the fleet. We jump.’

  ‘So ordered, lord,’ Carminus replied.

  Father, hear my cry.

  Reality, bleeding and savaged by the Ruinstorm, tore wide open. The Blood Angels plunged into the vortex of the warp consumed by rage. A klaxon sounded as the Red Tear’s Geller field shrieked with strain.

  Then reality collapsed. Only Sanguinius felt it from within his perceptions. He saw the shutters ripple and bulge. They flowed like liquid. The shapes of his legionaries smeared into nothing. Then the command deck vanished from his sight.

  Blows hammered his frame and stabbed his mind. His eyes were filled with a colossal figure in sin-black armour. Crimson eyes blazed. Fratricidal hate battered the breath of life from his body. Horus was the shape. Horus was killing him. The Angel’s death fell on him with a piercing immediacy. Blood soaked his sides and poured through rents in his armour. His hearts lurched under the agony of the terminal vision. The future grasped Sanguinius, a future where his hearts no longer beat, where the pain and fire of a lost, final battle dropped him into the endless dark.

  Here was certainty.

  Here was the end of all doubt.

  Sanguinius had thought he had come to terms with the inevitability of his death. If it was the price of saving his father, he would be the willing sacrifice. Yet now, as the attack sought to buckle him under its fury, as the maw of the dark gaped wide to swallow him, he did not feel the acceptance of the good death. He answered the rage with his own. It was rage at betrayal, at treachery and at crime that surpassed all understanding. Destruction took him, and he howled at the night, howled with a hate greater than he had ever known, yet was his completely, as much a part of his identity as the light he embraced. As the pain dragged him down, his howl filled the dark, becoming one with it. The howl grew, echoing, redoub­ling, shattering time and reason and hope.

  Death was his destiny. So too, was the howl.

  Father.

  My cry.

  Sanguinius fought back. He hurled his will against the wall of night and pain. Horus was not here. Horus was not looming in triumph over him. The reality of his death was not now. The future had not come. Not yet. Not yet.

  The Angel clenched his fists. His body responded to his will, and he took hold once more of his present self. He denied the pain of his ending. He pushed through it, rising as if from the depths of a molten ocean. He spread his wings in defiance and in the assertion of victory. The vision broke up. It did not vanish at once; it fragmented, its shards stabbing him to the last. Jagged patterns of black and blood and silver flashed and shimmered. They burned his vision, then fell like scales as he forced his way back to the real. The bridge reappeared, first as an uncertain transmission, then gathering substance, and at last the vision faded.

  Sanguinius exhaled. He had been in the grip of his death for the space of a single breath. Across the bridge, mortals and Space Marines struggled with psychic injuries. The warp storm was so furious that strands found minute weaknesses in the Geller field and forced their way through them. Servitors flailed at their stations, their limbs jerking chaotically, energy sparking out of the points of fusion between their flesh and machinic components. Officers clutched their heads. Some were screaming. Some were on their knees, jaws clattering hard enough to splinter teeth.

  But the damage was less than it might have been. The crew was strong. It had been tempered by Signus. Every man and woman on the bridge had survived the insanity that had taken so many of their comrades. They had been braced for the jump. In the midst of the siege of insanity, the command deck continued to function. After a few moments, someone shut down the klaxons. Medicae personnel pulled the incapacitated and the raving from the bridge.

  Raldoron looked shaken, but was standing firm. Kano was doubled over, a hissing snarl of pain and anger escaping from his clenched teeth. A nimbus of unlight flared at the edges of his psychic hood. Sanguinius placed a hand on the Librarian’s shoulder. Kano felt his presence. He straightened. The dark glow dissipated, and his eyes cleared. He looked at Sanguinius with deep anguish. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘I saw…’

  ‘You saw what has not come to pass. It does not matter.’ For now, he added to himself. ‘What matters is how the present moment tasks us.’

  Kano nodded, strain visible on his face. He was holding off the immaterium’s attack, but it had not ceased.

  Sanguinius turned back to Carminus. ‘Shipmaster,’ he said, ‘what is the status of the fleet?’

  ‘All vessels accounted for, but communications are breaking down,’ said Carminus.

  ‘Are there reports from the Navigators?’

  ‘No, though there have been no casualties among them.’

  The best we can hope for, then. With Terra invisible, there was no clear course to take through the warp, but if the coherence of the fleet was holding, the Navigators were managing, for the moment, to cleave to the course he had set them. The grand flotilla had direction. He could only hope it also had a destination.

  The Angel moved to the command dais’ hololith plate. ‘I will speak to the fleet,’ he said. While communications still functioned, he would impart what strength he could to his sons.

  Carminus pulled a lever on the console next to the throne, and the plate crackled to life. The hololith caster in every bay and hall of every vessel projected his image to the Blood Angels and to their mortal crews.

  ‘The transmission quality is erratic,’ said Varra Neverrus. The vox-officer barely looked up as she worked the controls at her station. ‘I don’t know how long it can be sustained.’

  Sanguinius nodded. He thought he could feel the dissolution of his image as it reached through the warp, the claws of the immaterium tearing apart the transmissions, fracturing the self he was sending to his sons.

  He had spoken to the fleet before the jump to Signus. That had been the Blood Angels’ last moment of true hope, and the last moment of delusion. They had been through the fire of ultimate treachery and of destroying revelation. There was no hope to speak of now. No promise of a cure. He would speak instead of strength and faith.

  ‘My sons,’ he said. ‘Legionaries of the Ninth, our war for Terra has already begun. The storm is our enemy as surely as Horus is. We know the nature of our foes much better than before. We know the truth of the danger they present. We are attacked on fronts far beyond the physical. We have seen how they might destroy us. But they have failed, and we are the stronger for it. Your armour is more than ceramite. You know what is in your blood. You know what you are capable of.’ He chose his words deliberately. Every Blood Angel would hear the two meanings of that sentence. He needed them to. The flaw he had cursed them with had almost destroyed them. ‘You know what you must guard against. Make that defence a sword. Its blade is the forged adamantium of our noble selves. Let us burn our way to Terra with the flames of our loyalty to the Emperor.’

  He stopped speaking. He knew the hololith transmission had broken down before Neverrus told him it had.

  Furious waves of unreality slammed against the hull of the Red Tear. The hololith plate screamed.

  The edges of the Angel’s vision cracked. Filaments of darkness coiled. The endlessly repeated moment of his death stabbed inwards to his consciousness.

  Sanguinius strode to the edge of the command dais. The hull groaned. The empyrean’s convulsions were roars and whispers that battered the ears and slid into the veins.

  ‘We fly on righteous wings,’ he
thundered, defying the storm. ‘We cannot be stopped.’

  The warp seemed to answer him. A massive surge struck the fleet. Even shielded by the Geller field, the auspex readings fell into shrieking madness. Pict screens shuddered, and their images suddenly looked too much like flesh. Vox-casters squawked and rasped with incoming transmissions, as broken and static-disrupted as they were urgent.

  ‘The Encarnadine has a Geller field breach,’ Neverrus said. ‘Incursions on the Scarlet Liberty, Sable and Requiem Axona.’

  Sanguinius pressed his lips together. An instinct, deep and ancient, insisted that the apparent response of the warp to his challenge was no illusion. The fleet was not just battered by the vortices the traitors had summoned into being. This attack was directed.

  Directed at him.

  I do not accept this, he thought. The implications were too grotesque. He was deluding himself with sinful pride. It was the same hubris that had convinced him the Imperium’s salvation depended on his taking the throne. Would he now decide the empyrean itself was attacking him?

  No.

  And yet. And yet.

  The Red Tear shuddered. The huge battleship was tossed by the fury of the warp.

  The death vision pressed harder, a bare membrane of consciousness holding it back. Beyond the vision, there was something else. A hint of shadow, the weight of a huge displacement wave, the thing that pushed the vision upon him, that used the storm against the fleet.

  You are watched. You are targeted.

  Again, he tried to shake the delusions off. His mind must be clear. There were threats enough that were real without him clouding his decision-making with hubristic anguish. Whether or not he, personally, was the subject of the attack, something was coming. The threads of unreality were already reaching into the ship. A serious breach was imminent.

  Sanguinius drew the Blade Encarmine from its sheath. Raldoron, in his office of equerry, approached and handed him the Spear of Telesto. Behind him, the doors of the bridge opened and Azkaellon led his Sanguinary Guard out to surround the command dais. At the sight of the gathering might of the Blood Angels, the human crew drew courage. The moans quieted. The officers worked their stations, holding the course of the Red Tear as true as they could in a realm where truth drew the blood of reason.

  Claws scratched at the hull. They scraped along it, as if it were a thin wall of tin. The shutters bulged again, and yet again, with the rhythm of strange lungs.

  The breach came in the bridge’s vault. It snaked in sharp angles down the height of the wall. It vibrated with the hum of a million flies. It began to peel back, metal framework and marble cladding turning flesh-red, flesh-supple, flesh-weak. The buzzing of the flies filled the command deck. The taste of the sound was foul on Sanguinius’ tongue. He felt the crawl of legs and the flutter of wings.

  A bell tolled, and with the chanting of a thousand festering tongues, the tear split wide.

  Two

  Divisions

  His name had been Toc Derenoth. He still accepted the syllables as a designation of his physical presence, but they were no longer the sum of his being. He had once marched in the Third Hand of the Word Bearers, but he had transcended that role. He had once served the Chaplain Kurtha Sedd. He had transcended that role, too. He had become the greater truth of the Word. He was two and he was one. He had cast away limits of flesh and the lies of old existence.

  He was Unburdened.

  He had resisted the coming of his transformation. In the profound depths of Calth, Kurtha Sedd had brought the gift upon him, and he had struggled to hold on to his trivial humanity. He had sinned against the Word. He had spurned the will of the gods. And so, there had been penance.

  He was Unburdened, yet he was imprisoned. He sat in the command throne of the battle-barge De Profundis. Psychic and physical chains bound him there. His nerves and the power conduits of the ship were one. Throughout the halls and chambers of the vessel, a ritual was proceeding, binding his being and the ship’s more and more tightly.

  He welcomed the duty of his chains because they presaged his bloody redemption. They were an agony as sublime as his transformation. Arrogance and selfish designs had, in the end, doomed Kurtha Sedd, who had sought his own transformation too late. Toc Derenoth had learned obedience. He had learned to submit to goals greater than his own, and he had been rewarded. A being had come to him on Calth. It called itself a celebrant of undivision. It took him from Calth. It brought him to the De Profundis to take part in a great hunt.

  When the ritual was complete, he would be unleashed upon the prey.

  Not long. Not long.

  His jaws parted in the long, slavering smile of truth.

  ‘We’re losing formation coherence,’ said Verus Caspean, Chapter Master of the First.

  So soon. Guilliman kept the frustration from his face. This jump was even shorter than the last, and the storm was about to force his squadron back into real space.

  The strategium of the Samothrace could be sealed off from the bridge and its distractions of moment-to-moment demands. The doors were closed now, turning the chamber into a sanctuary of war governance. Here the theoretical was tested. From here, the practical issued. The dome of the strategium was lower than that of the bridge, the darkness of its stone illuminated by a hololithic projection of the regional star chart. The relative closeness of the walls and the constant presence of the immediate battlefield focused the mind.

  The star chart was a complete blank during the transition through the warp. That was the one note of grace as the operation continued to break down. Guilliman took in the essentials of the onrushing, overlapping reports. The hololiths on the tacticarium table were a patchwork of approximations, guesses and darkness. It mocked Guilliman. It was the evidence of his campaign’s theoretical devolving into a pointless exercise, one that no practical could salvage.

  He had divided his fleet into strike forces, each powerful enough to annihilate a system. He had ordered tight formations. If the warp storms pulled the ships away from each other, their jump was to cease and the strike force reassemble before a new attempt was made. The wrenching apart was already occurring, and Guilliman’s cohort had barely started this jump.

  The deck heaved as the Samothrace ploughed through the storm. The Ultramarines officers gathered in the strategium did not shift with the motion. They were solid as marble columns. From the corner of his eye, Guilliman saw a ripple crawl down one side of the doorway. The materiality of the ship was less stable than his sons.

  ‘Theoretical,’ said Titus Prayto, speaking over the droning vox-speakers solemnly announcing the formation’s disintegration. ‘The increased resistance is evidence that this route is the correct one.’

  ‘An inviting theoretical,’ Guilliman told the Librarian. ‘One dangerously close to wishful thinking.’

  Prayto nodded once. ‘Admittedly so.’

  ‘And we have no choice but to verify it,’ Guilliman said. ‘Shipmaster,’ he voxed Turetia Altuzer, ‘end the jump.’

  ‘So ordered, my lord.’

  Deep in its core, the Samothrace shuddered. The tremor swept along the length of the ship. It passed under Guilliman’s feet. He grimaced in sympathy for the great vessel’s pain. A moment later, there was a change in the air, a more assured reality. They had returned to the materium.

  After a series of flickers, the star chart appeared in the vault again. Guilliman glanced up.

  ‘Apologies,’ Prayto said. ‘That was wishful thinking.’

  The stars were a scattered few. There was even more cogitator extrapolation than with the fleet positions. The Ruinstorm made even the most basic navigational measurements uncertain. Entire star systems, even ones that were theoretically in the near vicinity, were as invisible as Terra. There was still enough data for Guilliman to see the strike force’s position. The Samothrace and its escorts were on the north-wester
n fringe of Ultramar, a bare few light years from their previous position. They had moved laterally along the border. If there had been any progress towards Terra, it was well disguised. The nearest system was Anuari, and it was on the western edge of the chart, hardly close enough to register. The strike force had emerged in the deep void.

  ‘We’re scattered,’ said Drakus Gorod, commander of the Suzerain Invictus bodyguards.

  The tacticarium table blinked and rearranged its runes to reflect the new positions of the strike force. The ships had been thrown like a handful of bones across the region. Only the strike cruiser Cavascor was still attending the Samothrace.

  ‘Your theoretical may still be worth pursuing,’ Guilliman said to Prayto. He tried to push away the suspicion he was grasping at straws. Self-doubt had become an unwelcome, frequent companion. He had believed he had thought through all the possible consequences of Imperium Secundus. He had included, at its very inception, the contingency that his father was still on the throne of Terra. He worried that had been lip service to something he had not really believed was possible. If he had thought there truly was a chance that Horus had not conquered Terra, he wondered if he would have made the crime of Imperium Secundus a reality.