‘Then it fails through you,’ said Guilliman. ‘Now let’s be done. Hurry up and die.’
‘He doesn’t realise he’s already lost,’ Quor Vondor said to Phael Rabor. The captain didn’t reply, as if unconvinced. But then he charged with a speed and confidence that belied his wounded leg. He held the athame before him. Quor Vondor attacked at the same time. He hurled the athame at Guilliman’s face.
Guilliman read how they would move before they did. His counter was so fast, it was as if he had attacked first. He crouched, and Quor Vondor’s athame passed over his head. It buried itself in the wall. Guilliman fired a sustained burst into Phael Rabor’s chest and head. The rapid concussion of shells blew his armour open like an eggshell. Still clinging to the athame, Phael Rabor took three more steps. He was dead after two.
Guilliman whirled on Quor Vondor. Eldritch lightning crackled around the Word Bearer’s hands and head. Guilliman flung Incandor. It thudded into the centre of Quor Vondor’s forehead. The Apostle went rigid. His lightning lashed out with his death spasm. It struck with flashing violet light. A bolt hit Guilliman in the chest. He bore it. He stood, immovable, until Quor Vondor’s throes ended.
The wind of escaping atmosphere shrieked through the ship. Bolters chattered at the corridor end of the splinter. To Guilliman, a deep silence had fallen. He holstered his weapons, then pried the athame from Phael Rabor’s grip and jerked Quor Vondor’s blade from the wall. He held a knife in each hand; they were unnaturally heavy. He stared at the dull black edges. He remembered the feel of another athame, its blade against his throat. Kor Phaeron had barely nicked his flesh. An insignificant wound. Guilliman had mocked Kor Phaeron for his error. Back then he had not placed much importance on the blade. It was Kor Phaeron’s powers that had made the Word Bearer dangerous. Analysis of the conflict after leaving Calth had shown Guilliman his mistake. The knife had cut his flesh. It had drawn blood. But Kor Phaeron had not tried to kill him. He had tried to convert him.
The truth will shock you, Roboute, Kor Phaeron had said.
Embrace this.
This is the beginning of wisdom.
The athames were dangerous. Yet blades like the ones in his grasp had destroyed a powerful daemon on Calth.
Theoretical. The weapon of the enemy can be turned against him.
Practical…
He hesitated. So many unknowns getting in the way of evaluating risks and opportunities.
Practical…
Practical…
Guilliman’s vox-bead buzzed, jerking his attention back to the immediate. He hadn’t contemplated the athames for more than a second or two. He flinched, guilty as if he’d been in a fugue state for hours.
Altuzer was on the vox. ‘We are in contact with the rest of the fleet,’ she said.
‘Our ships?’ Guilliman asked.
‘Widely scattered, but close. Arriving from all directions.’
‘How long before they reach us?’
‘Minutes.’
In no time at all, then. But no time would be what the Samothrace and Cavascor had once the bombardment began again.
Theoretical. The enemy is holding fire to facilitate my assassination. Once they know I am still alive, the attacks will resume.
Practical. Do not show yourself to the Word Bearers. Let them think the struggle continues. Gain enough time for the fleet to arrive.
He made a conscious decision to consider the attack an assassination attempt. He refused to contemplate the idea of conversion.
He doesn’t realise he’s already lost.
He saved himself from introspection by considering how the gathering fleet should attack.
Practical. Use the advantage of our apparent weakness. ‘Then we are surrounding the enemy,’ Guilliman said. ‘Send the command to attack and engage as soon as the assaults can be coordinated. The fleet is a fist. Close it. Crush the foe.’
‘So ordered.’
Guilliman looked at the athames, and thought again about using the foe’s tools for his own purpose. ‘Shipmaster,’ he said. ‘What news from the Cavascor?’
‘It engaged the strike cruiser Annunciation. Captain Hierax’s Destroyer company boarded, as you commanded.’
Hierax would leave nothing behind but ash. The Annunciation was a dead ship even if the Word Bearers aboard believed otherwise. ‘Signal Chapter Master Iasus,’ Guilliman said. ‘Captain Hierax is to take the Annunciation’s Navigators alive.’
‘Understood.’
Guilliman sheathed the athames in his belt. He felt their presence as a cold pressure. He would store them securely as soon as he could. He drew his own weapons again and made his way back down the splinter, towards the sound of battle. He stopped while he was still out of sight. He listened to his sons purge the traitors from the Samothrace. He was the light in the shadows, holding back though instinct urged him to join the fight. The correct practical was to wait for the right moment, and then he would bring his avenging light to bear on the traitors.
What choice, ever?
The wait was a short one.
‘The fleet is here, primarch,’ Altuzer voxed.
‘Begin,’ Guilliman ordered.
The Night Lords were the first to react. The World Eaters were too focused on the chance to destroy the Ultramarines ships before them, so consumed with frustrated anger that the athame mission was taking so long, they barely noticed the first contacts on the auspex array. The Word Bearers vessels, in the centre of the operation, realised what was coming sooner, but the concentration of the squadron around the Samothrace and the Cavascor slowed their manoeuvre to face the approaching threat. The Night Lords, already hanging back, took the first contact seriously. Their squadron turned away from the Samothrace immediately.
The next contacts showed how big the threat was. Now the World Eaters reacted too. New contacts appeared with every second.
Wise heads on each ship realised what was happening. They had known this was a possibility. They had trusted in the prophet and the captain of the De Profundis to make the kill before now.
The squadrons were stronger than the two ships they had trapped. But they were not a fleet, and it was a fleet that came for them.
The Night Lords accelerated quickly. The strike cruisers Vitam Mortem and Night Revelation, with the frigates Infinite Fall, Phosphene and Descent from Hope did not look for a fight they could not win. They raced to translate into the empyrean while there was still time. The Glorious Nova fell on them, and with it the strike cruisers High Ascent, Cornucopia and Triumph of Reason, and almost a dozen frigates. At the command of the Glorious Nova, Captain Lucretius Corvo muttered thanks to the fates when he saw the Legion markings of the ships he was about to destroy. The streaks of hundreds of torpedoes carved the void with light, and every strike was an act of justice for the dead of Sotha.
The Night Revelation was at the head of the squadron, pulling even further ahead. The Ultramarines torpedo barrage hit it as its warp engines were spooling up to make the jump. Further back, the Vitam Mortem lowered its bow below the ecliptic, its angle with respect to the rest of the squadron becoming more and more steep. It was as close to an evasion as a vessel of its magnitude could muster.
Seventy-three torpedoes hit the Night Revelation in a matter of seconds. Its void shields collapsed immediately. The blasts that lit up the length of its hull fused into a single river of fire, a lava flow devouring the integrity of the strike cruiser. The warp engines went critical, and a sphere of unreality expanded from inside the hull. The shape of the vessel bulged, distorted and rippled as the shimmering bubble burst from its confines. The shimmer spread. The entire ship refracted fire and reality, a fragmenting mirror. Then it exploded. Ignited plasma and uncontrolled immaterium lashed out. The phantoms of the night perished in the heart of a new star. The killing light grew, and in its hunger it swallowed the Infinite F
all. The frigate’s hull melted as it drove through the fireball, and then it too became part of the purging dawn.
The Vitam Mortem went lower, and lower yet, until it was running perpendicular to the plane of the squadron’s flight. It sustained torpedo hits on its stern, and flames swept through its corridors, cutting off the enginarium from the superstructure. Primary power flickered. The void shields went down for a full two seconds. But then it was past the initial barrage, and still accelerating.
The Phosphene and the Descent from Hope tried to follow it. The High Ascent and Cornucopia took the Descent from Hope apart, moving forwards to trap the vessel between themselves, hammering it with batteries of cannons and macro-lasguns. It hit back, punishing the larger ships on either side, but it took many times the damage it could inflict. It was a flaming ruin when it emerged from between the two ships. It moved off into the void, a crematorium for all aboard.
On the bridge of the Glorious Nova, Corvo watched the Vitam Mortem’s evasion. The Nova’s course was changing to put it on a pursuit heading. ‘Are you seeing the craven flight?’ he voxed.
Aboard the battle-barge Magisterial, Chapter Master Empion of the IX answered, ‘We are.’ The Magisterial was only now coming into range of the battle. The ship and its escort were approaching from the direction in which the Vitam Mortem sought to flee. ‘The traitors are running into our teeth,’ Empion said.
The World Eaters did not try to run. Their formation attacked the Ultramarines as if the fleet had been drawn into a trap, and the traitors were not surrounded by a closing gauntlet. The strike cruisers Bellatorus and Creuisse led the charge. They were up against the battle-barge Gauntlet of Glory, the grand cruiser Suspiria Majestrix, the Chronicle, the Glory of Fire and twenty more ships beyond them. The World Eaters fired all their forwards guns at once. The barrage was a roar of defiance that cut through the Chronicle. The cruiser became a cloud of ignited gas and debris, moving forwards on momentum. Its kin repaid the attackers in kind; the Suspiria Majestrix’s nova gun hit the Creuisse head-on. The blast split the ship in two, the halves parting like jaws, then peeling back from the gathering eruption.
In the midst of the Word Bearers formation, the Annunciation turned against the flow of the retreat. It accelerated as if it sought to escape from the cluster of ships. It had ceased to respond to hails shortly before the arrival of the Ultramarines fleet. The Cavascor pulled away from it, and the Annunciation drove straight for the Orfeo’s Lament. The light cruiser was still turning when the larger ship closed in on it. It abandoned its manoeuvre and tried to accelerate on a tangent. The Annunciation struck it just forwards of the stern. It broke the Lament in half. It barrelled through the hull in a storm of explosions. Statuary from both ships, colossal embodiments of metaphor and the lessons of the dark, flew off from the collision in a swarm of tumbling fragments. The Orfeo’s Lament howled its last, and the plasma cry swept over the Annunciation. The strike cruiser’s bow was a ruin after the collision, twisted and fused. Tremors swept the hull, damage feeding damage until the ship was a bomb awaiting the signal for detonation. The signal came from the Cavascor, when Hierax remotely triggered melta charges he and his Destroyers had left behind. The raging holocaust grasped at the retreating squadron, scraping the void shields, striking at the vessels with a foretaste of the XIII Legion’s anger.
The full measure of this wrath came from the Ultimus Mundi, and the Gauntlet of Glory, and the Praetorian Trust, and the Triumph of Espandor, and the Unbroken Vigil, and the Aquiline, and scores more. The fist of the Ultramarines closed with convulsive fury. Not a single ship of the Night Lords, the World Eaters or the Word Bearers translated to the immaterium. Overwhelming force turned them to fire, to ash, to the dissipation of gas, and to the silence of dust. Cold, devastating precision annihilated the warriors of terror and of rage. But when it came to the sons of Lorgar, there was a shout that echoed on the bridges and in the halls and in the weapon bays of every ship involved in their destruction.
‘For Calth!’ went the cry. The Ultramarines fleet had been reduced by that betrayal, yet it was still the largest of any Legion. Many of the ships that had survived that day were present now. Their legionaries, hungry for victories and for justice, took their measure of revenge, and rejoiced.
‘For Calth! For Calth! For Calth!’
Guilliman oversaw the extermination of the squadron from the bridge of the Samothrace. He stayed focused. He monitored every action, and approved of the decisions of his sons. But the athames pulled at him. When the last of the enemy ships were guttering torches, he returned to his quarters alone. He sealed the door. A twenty-foot vault dominated the starboard wall. He opened it, revealing compartmentalised stasis chambers. He placed the athames in an empty one, engaged the field and stepped back. The air between him and the blades shimmered slightly. The vault door boomed when he shut it. Hexagrammic circuits locked the vault down tight. It would open to him and no one else. The athames were secured now. They were beyond doing harm.
His hand rested on the wheel of the door.
They can be studied now, he thought. Maybe they can be used.
In the lower levels of the Samothrace, cells held the Navigators captured from the Annunciation and transported by Thunderhawk from the Cavascor. They, too, might be used.
Theoretical. The tools of the enemy subverted from their purpose can be among the most effective weapons against the foe.
Theoretical. These tools may be dangerous in their own right. Any attempted use may invite disaster.
His analysis was incomplete. He couldn’t tell which theoretical was the most valid.
What choice, ever?
He thought he heard the voice in the flame laugh.
He doesn’t know he’s already lost.
Sanguinius beholds a vision of Horus aboard the Vengeful Spirit
Five
Chorale
The Lion’s Stormbird approached the rent in the hull of a mass conveyer. The ship was one of the largest in the graveyard. Apart from the breach, which extended almost a third of its length, it was intact. Pict and vid screens displayed shifting views of the freighter. The Lion sat on an elevated throne, eyeing the images, trying to pierce the ship’s secret. The gunship’s lights picked out its name above the breach, a quarter of the way back from the prow. It was the Chorale. The marlins were faded, almost invisible. The ship had been in a poor state of repair long before its end.
The Lion frowned. He turned to Khalybus. ‘You said the ships were not warp-capable. A conveyor of this size would be.’
The Iron Hands captain looked at the centre pict screen a moment longer. Then he tapped it, freezing the image. ‘It would be,’ he agreed. ‘Normally. But look at the engine.’ He pointed. ‘It’s been modified. I suggest the warp engines have been removed.’ He waved his hand, taking in the whole of the ship. ‘So much patchwork,’ he said. ‘Layers of it. I would say an accretion of centuries. This is a vessel that was rescued from the scrapheap and used for short journeys, by many owners.’
Khalybus glanced back at the Lion only once as he spoke. If he was curious about the primarch insisting on leading the exploration of the wreck himself, he said nothing, and his ruined face was unreadable. If he resented being a guest on the Dark Angels mission rather than leading one himself, he kept that hidden too.
Holguin, though, looked no happier than he had on the Invincible Reason.
‘I must see for myself,’ the Lion had told him, putting a stop to the voted lieutenant’s objections. ‘I will verify what I have been told.’
Holguin had opened his mouth to ask, By whom? He stopped himself. His eyes narrowed, though. He knew.
Very well, then, the Lion had thought. So you know why I need to be sure. If the secret of the way forwards is contained in these wrecks, I will not see it through an intermediary.
Now he asked Khalybus, ‘Can you extrapolate what kil
led the ship?’
‘I see no sign of collision. The engine looks intact. The work on the hull is poor. I suspect metal fatigue. Internal pressure finally burst the hull.’
‘Just as it reached this location. At the same time that disaster befell all these other ships.’
‘I do not trust the coincidence, either,’ said Khalybus.
The Stormbird flew inside the Chorale. The breach was over a mile long and a hundred yards high. Multiple levels of cargo bays were open to the void. The gunship came in for a landing in the most sternward of the upper bays, the closest to the ship’s superstructure and bridge. The Lion donned his helmet and pulled open the Stormbird’s side hatch as the retro exhaust nozzles vented gas, manoeuvring the ship to the deck in the absence of gravity and atmosphere. The Lion pushed himself down. His boots maglocked to the bay decking.
The five-man squad selected by Holguin spread out, bolters ready. Holguin’s helm lights were the first to pass over the inner wall of the bay. ‘This is an enemy ship,’ he said.
The Lion joined him. The wall was covered in runes. Some had been burned into the surface, others had been daubed in blood. The Lion’s lip curled. Their forms were becoming familiar in all the worst ways. Repeated exposure did nothing to dull their obscenity, or their uncanny nature. If he looked at any one of the runes for too long, the conviction grew that it was about to start moving. Human hands had marked the walls, and they had used a language that had no origin in the materium, and that no sane being should ever contemplate.
The eight-pointed star held dominion over all the other signs.
‘Matters are becoming clearer,’ Khalybus said.
‘You have had dealings with these cults too, then,’ said Holguin.
‘And the beings they worship, yes.’ His voice, thick with hate, grated more harshly than before. ‘We have established a base on Thrinos,’ he went on, naming a moon in the neighbouring Anesidorax System. ‘There are refugees there, from many worlds. This plague is widespread in the subsector.’
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