Sanguinius grimaced. The immaterium was not space. Even to speak of relative distance between ships was to attempt to impose an illusion on the indescribable. But the human mind needed its frames of reference.
‘It’s big,’ Mautus went on.
‘You are being vague, lieutenant,’ Raldoron warned. ‘At least tell us if this is a ship.’
Sanguinius placed a calming hand on the First Captain’s pauldron.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Mautus. ‘I can’t. It’s very big. It… I don’t know. It’s too big.’
‘Train our weapons on it,’ the Angel said. ‘Fleet master, the command to fire is yours.’
‘As you will, my lord,’ said Carminus.
Sanguinius nodded, and headed for the doors. They opened before him, and he rushed out to cleanse his ship of invaders.
As he ran towards the sounds of combat, he felt a shadow press in. It was just beyond the edge of his consciousness, yet it weighed on his hearts like a planetary mass. He knew, beyond the excuses of reason, that it was the same shadow that Mautus had detected. And it was immense.
The De Profundis splintered, and there were no good practicals.
‘Our first volley did that?’ Caspean said. ‘Too easy.’
‘We didn’t destroy it,’ said Guilliman. ‘We did exactly what they wanted us to do.’
For several moments, the fragments of the Word Bearers vessel stayed close enough together that they preserved its silhouette. It seemed to expand, the space between the pieces gradually widening. As the De Profundis closed with the Samothrace, it finally looked like what it was – a hail of jagged shards, a ship turned into shrapnel. Every sliver stabbed towards the Ultramarines battleship.
Guilliman read the contours of the trap, and cursed what he saw. The Word Bearers had closed off his options. If he redirected any power to the forwards void shields, he opened the ship to destruction by the Night Lords or the World Eaters. If he didn’t reinforce the forwards defences, he was going to be hit by hundreds of boarding torpedoes at once. All he had left was weapons fire.
‘Cavascor,’ he called on the vox. ‘Coordinated fire on the De Profundis. Cut down that swarm.’
‘So ordered,’ Iasus answered.
The Samothrace was already redirecting its artillery. The batteries of plasma projectors and macro-cannons threw up a wall of incandescent destruction. Torpedoes streamed towards the intact shapes of the rest of the Word Bearers fleet.
‘Up thirty degrees,’ Guilliman said. It was too late to evade. The impacts were seconds away. But evading even a few shards could make a difference.
The bow of the Samothrace began to rise above the ecliptic. The splinters of the De Profundis ran into the storm of fire from the two Ultramarines ships. The void flashed with the disintegration of fragments. The Samothrace drove into clusters of explosions. It shuddered as more Night Lords torpedoes struck the stern. The Cavascor tightened up with the battleship, trying to interpose its bulk with the long-range fire of the World Eaters. Guilliman heard Iasus over the vox, roaring defiance at the XII Legion. At this moment, the Chapter Master, one of the most thoughtful of Guilliman’s commanders, sounded more than ever like he was one with the aggressive companies of Destroyers he led.
Void shields strained. Through the oculus, their pulses seared the eye. Bursts of ignited plasma marched along the flanks of the warships. The splinters hit, and still more of them blew apart as they collided with the shields.
But there were scores behind them, and the forwards shields of the Samothrace collapsed under a hail of impacts. The swarm smashed the bow. Shards broke up against the ablative armour. They came in at a shallow angle on the upper hull, streaking it with rolling fireballs. And they hit the superstructure. The change in the ship’s orientation was enough to destroy still more. If they did not hit directly, they could not pierce the alloy of the ship’s hide.
Some did pierce it. Guilliman felt the blows even before the breach klaxons sounded. Needles stabbed into the body of the Samothrace, and poison flowed from them into its veins. One hit just below the bridge. The vibration of the impact was a quiver of pain, the spirit of the Samothrace reacting to a wound worse than the drawing of blood.
‘With me,’ he said to Gorod and Prayto. Gorod and the squad of bodyguards on the bridge formed up around their primarch. To Caspean, Guilliman said, ‘The bridge is yours.’
Caspean slammed a fist against his breastplate. ‘They won’t set foot on this deck.’
The Samothrace had already borne the insult of the Word Bearers’ presence over Calth. Guilliman would not see it suffer the same indignity.
‘All breached halls sealed,’ said Altuzer.
The splinters of the De Profundis were not true boarding torpedoes. They did not have the means to close rents in the hull with foam. The bleed of atmosphere to the void had triggered the automatic defence protocols.
Guilliman drew the Gladius Incandor and the Arbitrator. He held the combi-bolter before him as he marched out of the bridge, finger on the trigger and ready to deliver judgement.
The Ultramarines ran into the enemy one level down from the bridge. The splinters had pushed the outer walls in when they hit, narrowing the corridors and filling them with wreckage. Guilliman waded into the first clutch of Word Bearers. His lips were pulled back in hate. He pulled the trigger of the Arbitrator rapidly, the shots echoing the furious beat of his pulse. The traitors sprayed the halls with bolter fire. They were responding to his presence too quickly. Their shots smacked into his armour. The shells were nothing to him; a slight wind, a failed distraction. He ignored them. His shells hit the traitors like warheads. He shot the Word Bearers through their helmets. Their heads burst, painting the walls with blood, gouging them with ceramite shrapnel. Guilliman marched past the first splinter and over the bodies. Though his actions were unhurried, he had slaughtered a squad of Word Bearers before Gorod and his men could find a target.
Ahead, the bulkhead was twisted and had failed to seal. A stiff wind of escaping atmosphere blew against his cheeks, pulling at him, calling him towards the next fight. Legion banners hanging from the ceiling swayed and flapped. The walls of the Samothrace rang with gunfire.
‘We have numerous breach points,’ Gorod said.
‘We will repel them,’ said Prayto. ‘Our numbers far exceed those the enemy could possibly have inserted.’
‘Then why make the attempt?’
‘Lord Guilliman,’ Altuzer voxed. ‘The enemy has ceased bombardment of the Samothrace.’
‘And the Cavascor?’ Guilliman asked.
‘Still under attack.’
‘Tell Iasus to take the offensive,’ he said. ‘Close with the nearest enemy ship. Use it as a shield and launch assault rams. Turn Captain Hierax and his Destroyers loose on its bridge.’
As he reached the ruined bulkhead, Guilliman paused. ‘Theoretical,’ he said to his warriors. ‘This is more than a simple boarding attack.’ He looked at Prayto. ‘Are you sensing anything?’
Prayto was frowning. ‘Not a build-up, exactly. Nothing in our vicinity to suggest they’re planning a…’ He grimaced. ‘A sorcerous assault.’ The word still did not come easily to anyone in the Legion, even the psykers. ‘But there is something. A presence, I think. Not far.’
‘Then we’re forewarned,’ Guilliman said. He kicked at the buckled door, knocking it out of its frame. He advanced into the corridor more cautiously. Shattered ferrocrete cladding littered the deck. Another splinter had broken through fifty yards down, but there did not appear to be any Word Bearers nearby. Guilliman glared at the shard as he moved past it. It protruded through the hull of the Samothrace as a thing of jagged diagonals and broken lines. Its shape was crystalline. He shared a look with Prayto.
‘This result was not achieved by technological means,’ the Librarian said.
‘But this isn’t the so
urce of what you’re detecting.’
‘No.’
The wind’s keen was high and savage. The twitching light of the Ruinstorm leaked through the fissures between the splinter and the broken hull.
Past the shard, the corridor curved as it approached the port corner of the superstructure. From the bend onwards, the lumen globes in the ornate bronze wall sconces had been smashed. Here, the shadows had breached the Samothrace. They waited for Guilliman. He knew it, and was ready. He raised the Arbitrator. He held the Gladius Incandor low at his side, blade angled outwards.
‘It’s close,’ Prayto said.
‘Is it… human?’ Guilliman asked. His reason still rebelled against the word daemon.
‘I’m not sure. It seems grounded in the materium.’
‘But it isn’t a Space Marine.’
Prayto hesitated. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I’m picking up thoughts. It knows you are coming.’
‘That is hardly surprising.’
‘It is eager.’
‘Noted.’ Guilliman was eager too. He anticipated a trap, but he would not deny his anger. The ambush had happened on the edges of Ultramar, but still Ultramar. The boarding of the Samothrace was another insult. He would seek redress in traitor’s blood.
‘Theoretical,’ said Gorod. ‘If the boarding assault has no practical chance of taking the ship, its target must be a narrower one.’
‘Me,’ said Guilliman.
‘Titus’ evidence points in that direction.’
‘I agree. Your practical had better not involve me leading from the rear.’
‘I’ll revise it.’
‘See that you do.’
They reached the shadows and the curve. The corridor stretched several hundred yards in darkness. Sparks from ruptured electrical conduits created a feeble glow around the De Profundis splinter at the far end. When Guilliman rounded the corner, rasping, inhuman bellowing erupted from inside the shard.
The darkness around the splinter deepened, and the wind grew stronger. The shadows began to bubble and smoke. Cracks appeared in the decks and walls spreading outwards from the shard. The thing inside was taking apart the reality of the Samothrace.
Guilliman ran. The Invictus guards and Prayto charged forwards with him. They hurtled down the corridor, Arbitrator and bolters sending a mass-reactive barrage ahead of them. There were no visible targets, but they had to be there.
This is a trap, Guilliman thought as he pounded deeper into the shadows. The enemy knows I have to respond. The threat is real and I must counter it, so this is when they will spring the ambush.
He understood that the ships of three Legions, and the void war in its totality, were the means to the end that would come now. I should be flattered, he thought.
The shadows were thick as pitch. They pressed against Guilliman, trying to slow him. Even with his enhanced vision, he couldn’t see more than a couple of paces ahead. The spreading red cracks illuminated nothing except themselves. The splinter seemed to hunch lower, melding itself into the fabric of the Samothrace. Guilliman cut through it with Incandor. He shot it as though it were flesh. The Ultramarines’ gunfire hit home. Dying Word Bearers materialised from the dark. Their brothers, giving up on futile concealment, retaliated. Guilliman took the return fire seriously. He snapped off shots at every muzzle flash. His focus flicked back and forth from the attacks in the blackness to the spreading disintegration and the splinter at its centre. Neither was the true assault. Either could be its source.
On his right, Prayto stretched an arm. A blast of psychic lightning tore through the darkness. It burned through the gorget of a Word Bearer and set his head on fire, but still the darkness intensified.
The roars from inside the splinter grew louder. They were mocking, triumphant. As Guilliman reached the shard, two squads of Word Bearers erupted from the dark. They surrounded him, attacking with chainswords and powerblades. He parried and slashed with Incandor. He exploded helms and skulls with the Arbitrator. Gorod and the others cut into the Word Bearers, trapping them between Guilliman’s cold rage and his bodyguards’ lethal precision.
This is still not the real attack, Guilliman thought. He plunged the Gladius Incandor through ceramite marked with spidery runes of such density they seemed to crawl. He drew the blade to the right, cutting armour and muscle, disembowelling the traitor. The front of the shard was open, and he moved inside, leaving the struggle at the entrance behind.
He advanced three steps, seeing nothing at first. There was only the cloying black. Then the monster lunged out of the night. It was massive, spined and horned. Its jaw was long and powerful enough to snap iron. It could never have been human, but the remains of Word Bearers armour clung to its tree-trunk limbs. The old markings were still there, to be read, as if the powers that had transformed the Word Bearer desired all who saw it to know what it had once been, and know despair. Warp-fire tendrils arced from its body to the sides of the splinter, turning into webs, then cracks. This thing was the source of the disintegration.
In the distortion of form, the complete desolation of anything human and the mockery of the preserved armour, Guilliman saw the distillation of the perversion and treachery of the XVII Legion.
He jerked back, firing the Arbitrator as the monster lashed out with a massively clawed hand. The blow threw off his aim, and the shell punched through its left shoulder, disintegrating flesh and spines. The monster snarled and lunged. It was fast, and its movements slid between the real and the immaterial, hard to track and counter. Guilliman blocked a strike with Incandor, but then the claws were suddenly coming from a different angle, and the creature seized him. It was huge, half again as tall as he was, and its flesh was still shifting, mutating, growing in the glory of its ascended state.
‘I am Toc Derenoth,’ it boomed with a double voice. ‘I am Unburdened. And I will unburden your ship.’ It bent Guilliman backwards, acid dripping from its jaws.
Guilliman heard the first cracks in his armour. He resisted, and the monster grew even larger, fed by the warp. Toc Derenoth’s eyes were a milky white, but patterns swirled in them, forming and dissolving runes.
Guilliman tore his arms free. He fired and stabbed into Toc Derenoth’s chest. The stream of shells blasted a hole a foot wide in the monster’s chest, breaking its hold and hurling it back. Guilliman drove the gladius deep into the wound, puncturing things that had once been organs. Toc Derenoth howled, the twinned voices wrapping around Guilliman’s mind in pain and fury.
Guilliman poured bolter shells into the thrashing beast. The web of disintegrating unreality began to withdraw. The crimson light dimmed, and the substance of the splinter became more stable. It began to resemble a fragment of a void ship’s bridge once again. Undulating mounds became the wreckage of cogitators and pict screens. The floor shifted from tissue to ferrocrete. The shape of a command throne began to appear in the centre of the darkness.
‘I want you off my ship,’ Guilliman said. He advanced, emptying the Arbitrator’s magazine into the monster, driving the deathless thing back, reclaiming reality inside the splinter. He measured every step, calculating his position with respect to the outer hull. The sounds of battle behind him grew quieter and more distant.
The splinter was long, many times longer than any boarding torpedo. Guilliman had thought of it as a dart striking the battleship. He was wrong. It was a worm that had worked its way into the body of the Samothrace. He moved deeper and deeper into the dark maw, until he reached a point where the splinter extended beyond the outer hull. He forced the Unburdened back even further, then trained the Arbitrator’s fire on the floor of the splinter. The shells blew huge rents in the material. Guilliman arced the shells from the deck to the walls, carving out a circular fissure in the shard. No longer battered by the combi-bolter, Toc Derenoth moved forwards. The Unburdened was slow at first, so much of its mass lying shredde
d on the deck. But darkness fed it, embraced it, and gave it rebirth. Bones re-formed. The chest sealed. The shattered jaw was whole again. The monster charged, shaking the deck. The splinter began to come apart. Toc Derenoth was a few paces away when Guilliman finished sawing through the shard. He blasted away the last of the splinter’s integrity. Metal snapped and tore. The void appeared through the gap. The fierce wind of escaping atmosphere blasted through the narrow tunnel. Guilliman stood strong against it, but Toc Derenoth stumbled.
The rear portion of the splinter fell away, carrying the Unburdened with it. The monster clung to edges of the gap, already too distant to leap. It stared at Guilliman with its white eyes. Its crocodilian jaws opened and closed, opened and closed, snapping in frustration as its prison took the Unburdened further and further into emptiness.
Guilliman turned away and marched into the wind. He was almost halfway down the length of the splinter when he realised he had misread Toc Derenoth’s reaction. The Unburdened had not been raging. It had been laughing.
Understanding came too late. He had relaxed his guard. The shadows ahead and behind parted.
Guilliman saw the dull blades in their hands, and cursed the depths of his foolishness.
Four
The Lure of Revelation
‘We have been hailed,’ Stenius said when the Lion returned to the bridge, ‘by a frigate of the Tenth Legion.’
The Lion gazed at the ship visible in the oculus. ‘You’ve its identity?’
‘We have. It’s the Sthenelus. A vessel of the Eighty-fifth Clan-Company.’
The frigate’s shape was battered. It looked like an ancient iron ingot, eroded and gnawed by rust and time. The hull was scarred by las-burns and patched repairs over torpedo hits. Some of its cannon batteries were gone, leaving behind wounds like broken teeth. The architecture of the upper hull was not much more than a functional ruin, yet the ship still conveyed the strength of a clenched fist. It was bloodied, but had not fallen.
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