by David Guymer
Tulwei looked to his left. The Dark Angel, Vehuel, throttled his engine, a challenge in his hooded eyes. He looked to his right. The Soul Drinker, Grigorus, looked back, gauntlet over his gear stick, the other on the throttle. Tulwei grinned in anticaption of the great race to come. A countdown timer scrolled down the left-hand side of his helm display.
‘Nearly, brothers.’
And the countdown ended.
Terra – Imperial Palace
Check 0, -00:00:57
The Meridian Chamber, a little known sub-annexe of the Clanium Library, was where the fractal vagaries of Imperial time were charted and thus standardised. Here, seconds, minutes and hours were ticked off, blinked away, their passage marked by the tens of thousands of asynchronous timepieces. The four walls were divided by the four outer segmenta, each one further subdivided by sector, by subsector, and, for particularly prominent, heavily settled regions, by system. Muttering chrono-savants in dusky robes compared neighbouring pieces, meditated over astropath logs and shipping data and, where necessary, made corrections, circled by joyful cherub seraphim. Here, Imperial Standard Time was set.
Koorland, Lord Commander of the Imperium, last of the Imperial Fists, stepped smartly out of the way as one of the hunchbacked magi shuffled blindly across him. Its robes scuffed the floor. Hourglasses adorned with cyberskull motifs and filled with grains of glass swayed from a belt of woven metal. The magos approached the group of chanting acolytes that surrounded the Praeceptor, the master chrono: a scuffed leaden tank the size of a drop pod, delineating Terran time by atomic resonance exactly as it had done for the last thirty thousand years. The magos’ tools clicked and chittered over the venerable machine.
‘What is the verdict, magos?’
The adept took his time in answering. Imperial time was an arcane measure. It was fractal, ever changeable. The unimaginable distances between worlds and the time-bending effects of warp travel rendered linearity subjective at best.
But not so for the Beast. His greatest strength, the orks’ subspace propulsion technology, was also mankind’s most glaring, stone-age strategic weakness. He could move from system to system at speeds greater than the warp’s. His lines of communication were instantaneous. Koorland had but one chance to catch the orks unprepared. The Deathwatch assault on the Terran attack moon had required to-the-second timing. Accomplishing the same over interstellar distances was an exponential order of magnitude more difficult.
Fail, and he would never find them unprepared again.
After a few seconds in which hundreds of timepieces ticked out their own relativistic versions of time, the chrono-magos turned. His face was hooded, but clicked with moving parts. ‘There is a reasonable degree of probability that our times are now in synchrony.’
Koorland clenched one gauntleted fist and glanced over his shoulder.
Maximus Thane stood in front of the clock-lined wall with arms crossed, garbed in a long surplice that was as severe as a statue’s and grey as the genetic character of his eyes. He nodded once, and Koorland made a smile, some of the tension he felt disappearing in it. Some, but not all.
Everything rested on this.
‘The Lords will be waiting. Call them into the Library, brother.’
Valhalla – Kalinin trench
Check 3, 00:00:00
Officers of the CCCIII sounded out long blasts on their whistles and Valhallan soldiers fixed bayonets, pushed wobbling trench ladders to the walls and yelled, screams as formless as the steam that burst from their mouths. They began to climb. Squadrons of patched-up Leman Russ tanks rattled forward in support on cleated tracks. Marauder fighter-bombers, invisible in the blizzard, rumbled overhead.
Tulwei gunned his engine and allowed the attack bike to crunch slowly forward. He fingered his chainsword’s activation stud impatiently, waiting for the signal, and watched as it began.
Eidolica – atmospheric entry
Check 7, 00:00:00
It began.
A splutter of thrust arrested Tyris’ descent. The thrill of afterburners shivered through his armour. Then nothing. He opened his arms and glided, no sound in his helmet but his own breath, the hiss of stabilisers. Solar radiation had killed unit vox, but every warrior knew his role. The atmosphere flared with short promethium burns as the others made use of their jump packs to correct their angles.
The sun was ferocious, his visor seared to grey opacity. He could barely see the landing zone at all, the listing fortress of the Fists Exemplar, but the greenskins would have had to shut down auspex grids and seal their shutters in preparation for the dawn. What was he – a charcoal speck in the daylight furnace, a mote, invisible in the light, a streak on the white-glare armaplas sky. He was the net, the knife.
He was the Raven.
And the orks would rue the day the Lord Commander had called his brothers to the war.
Plaeos – Mundus Trench
Check 2, 00:00:00
Kjarvik’s pack lights pierced the gloom of the oceanic trench to a distance of about ten metres. Rust flakes and bits of debris, from fingernail-size down, danced from the darkness of the water column in a reflective swirl for the passing of the beams. Depth indicator runes pulsed in his helm display, bleeding redly into the hyper-pressurised backdrop on the opposite side of the armourglass.
Running across his path at roughly man-height was a ridge of dirt: pipes, buried in sediment and planktonic xenoforms. Polyps and tendrils and silvery, segmented creatures retreated from Kjarvik’s light as though the sea floor were a living thing that recoiled from his touch. He clumped around.
One of the Sisters of Silence lumbered towards him. Dozens of tiny indicator lights lit up her form and the shoal of escaping bubbles that rippled around her. Unlike the superb homeostatic systems of Kjarvik’s power armour, her suit lost most of her exhaled gases with every breath. He could function at this depth for days, without food or rest if need be, but it had already taken them half an hour just to reach the bottom of the ocean trench. She probably had the same again at best.
Her hands moved in front of her. Slowly. As though chained to great weights buried deep beneath the sea floor.
‘There is time,’ she gestured, using Adeptus Astartes battle-sign. She raised a sluggish gauntlet to point right along the run of pipes. Kjarvik blinked up a tri-dimensional gridmap of the ocean bottom, overlaid with the runes of Umbra and flowing datascreed. His eyes roved over it, absorbing it metaconsciously. Hive Mundus’ foundation levels were about five hundred metres that way. It would be a hard half-kilometre in power armour.
‘Very well,’ he voxed, and then on Umbra’s shared frequency, ‘Kjarvik. Moving to target.’ He started right, following the line of piping.
The rest of the squad called in: Bohr, Zarrael, Phareous, Baldarich, a vox-click from the second Sister of Silence. The tracker runes in his helm display confirmed their convergence on the target. The Sister followed cumbersomely behind him, breathing heavily into the vox as she struggled to keep to his pace.
Pillows of dust rose languidly from the sea bed with the stomp of his boots, his visibility dropping to eight metres, then six, then three, a shoal of glittering particulates surrounding him like carnivores around a piece of meat. He continued on augur readings, the pipes always on his left. He glanced down for a moment to check the helmet-sized dish of ceramite casing that was maglocked to his hip. It was a melta mine. Its systems responded to his armour’s auto-interrogator with a squirt of reassuringly passive signals.
A double click on his vox-channel pulled his attention back up.
His pack beams slashed the dark with silver as he looked around. He snarled in frustration. The signal came again, click click, as urgent as a non-vocal responder could be. A Vow of Tranquility was all to the good in your cloister. He disengaged his bolt pistol’s holster seals, and the weapon came away in his gauntlet in a rush of air bubbles.
>
He half turned, head moving a fraction ahead of his weighted body, and saw it. A black shape, smooth, shiny like oil, cut his light beam in half. He stomped back and it flashed by him, barely two metres from his face, more of it sweeping past as he pulled up his bolt pistol. His light flashed over the leviathan’s blubbery underbelly. Fins. Webbed claws. Weird, oily camouflage.
His pistol fired with a thunderous boom. A compression wave rippled out ahead of the bolt, propellant burn frothing up the water in its wake. The second explosion came a split-second later with a sudden blossom of red. The pressure held it together rather than allow it to disperse and the ragged, heavier-than-water spill slowly sank.
There was no cry of pain, no ultrasonic squeal of panic or alarm. Kjarvik watched it swim past, separating the billowing blood sac into smaller droplets with a parting swipe of its gargantuan tailfin. He had barely scratched it.
A vox-crackle spoke into his ear. ‘Did you kill a fish, brother-sergeant?’
‘First blood to me, Phareous.’
‘It only counts if you kill it,’ said Zarrael.
‘Are you using a secure squad link to keep tally?’ grumbled Baldarich. Kjarvik did not think that the Black Templar liked him very much.
The huge metal wall of Hive Mundus’ exterior shell soaked up his light beam. It was a sheer cliff face of adamantium composite, encrusted with organisms that had spent the last five thousand years evolving to break it down. Kjarvik surveyed it quickly, beam nipping left, right, up, down. Its visual appearance aligned with the schematics that the tech-priests had released to Bohr. The deep ocean had shielded the hive’s foundations from the orbital strikes that had devastated the surface, and given a base for the orks to subsequently rebuild.
But it had been weakened. Kjarvik could see the hairline fractures in the plating.
‘Kjarvik. In position.’ He uncoupled the melta mine from its hip suspensor and clamped it to the wall, voxing it in as he backed up to put some distance between himself and it. Four more confirmations came swiftly back.
‘Detonation in three,’ voxed Bohr.
Kjarvik turned to the Sister. Her blank face was illuminated by the cold square of lumen strips that outlined the edges of her pressure mask.
‘Two.’
He clasped the woman’s wrist in his gauntlet. She turned to him questioningly, and he grinned. He was the Stormcrow. The unlucky.
‘One.’
Two
Terra – the Imperial Palace
Check 0, 00:21:01
Tomorrow, he would be dead.
That view was Mesring’s own. His deterioration continued to baffle the mindless flow of hospitallers, physicae, and witch doctors that his personal staff summoned to his bedside. The cramps that woke him in the night to screaming agony at the passage of anything more fortifying than filtered water across his lips mystified them. As for the bouts of dizziness, the sweats, the lucid nightmares where he raved of plots and blasphemy – well, they were cause for great consternation. Every test was returned negative. Every palliative or medicament applied did nothing. It led even the most long-serving and decent amongst his staff to question whether it was simply his time. That he, Erekart Veneris Sanguinan Mesring, had served the divine Emperor for as long as He willed it.
Mesring would have sneered had he that much strength. The Emperor could not will Himself out of His own throne.
His opinion on his prospects, however, seemed to be one that his closest aides shared. He could think of no other reason, besides another ghastly hallucination, for the presence of Arch-Confessor Vitori Mendelyev beside him for his final hours.
‘This is a beautiful shrine,’ said Mendelyev. The old man took a deep breath of shriven air and candle smoke. ‘Peaceful.’ He had a soft, calming voice, an open face, both of which Mesring supposed were aids to his duties as confessor to the powerful.
‘I will not keel over on cue,’ Mesring snarled, fingernails digging into the wood back of the pew in front with his efforts at not crying out for the pain twisting in his gut. This was why he had sat in the second row when, as Ecclesiarch, the Emperor’s mortal representative on Terra, he could sit wherever he damn well pleased.
‘Of course,’ said Mendelyev, and fell silent. His eyes were closed, his lips moving soundlessly, his bald head dappled with the light of over a million candles. One for every world in the Emperor’s demesne. Mesring gave a rustling cackle, bringing the taste of old vomit back up into his mouth. Someone was failing to keep tally. There should be a few less of the things and their insufferable flickering by now.
The Cardinals’ Wake was a private sanctuary for the most senior clergy of the Adeptus Ministorum. The area was too sacred, and too sensitive, for their junior colleagues, and so even the most menial of functions from changing the oils in the scenting bowls to cleansing the colossal clerestory of stained glass were peformed by deacons and lectors, old men who could have been anointed primates of entire sectors and lived in commensurate luxury, but had instead opted to sweep the floors here. Mesring’s contempt for them was as limitless as the stars. The occasional Mechanicus adept, garbed respectfully in the palest off-white pink, worked out of sight beneath the basalt and gold statues of saints and Ecclesiarchs past, all the way back to Veneris I.
No effort was made to mask the great fibre-bundles and conduits that ran through the cathedra from the blessed machinery of the Golden Throne. It was sacred to both worlds, Terra and Mars, and the gentle susurrus of its continual operation was equally soothing to auditory systems of nerves and of wire. That was why the cardinals had held vigil here since the Emperor’s internment, and was what brought Mesring here now. Though he did not seek peace.
‘Doomed, all of you,’ he muttered, shivering, glaring at the handful of grey-haired clergy sat in silent prayer throughout the shrine. ‘Better to placate the Great Beast than trust in Him.’
‘The Emperor forgives and protects,’ said Mendelyev placidly, as though he had heard every deathbed blasphemy imagined by man.
‘It was the Emperor’s trespasses that brought the slow death to mankind. Ten millennia of decay and then final damnation. That is the loving bequest I foresee. One that only the Beast offers salvation from.’
The confessor, though bound for the same hell that awaited them all, of which Mesring now suffered but a fleeting foretaste, merely smiled. ‘In His deathless state, the Emperor reveals His divinity.’
‘Spare me. I can recite all the hypocrisy from memory.’
‘You want some new truth?’ said Mendelyev, soft still but with a firmer edge. ‘You have lived long and well, eminence. To all outward appearances you have been a paragon of the virtues of the Creed.’ Mesring caught the subtle reprimand. ‘The Emperor thinks little of self-pity. Believe me in this, eminence, that nothing eases a man’s passing like a little grace at the end.’
‘Grace,’ Mesring spat. ‘Vulkan is dead!’
The confessor shrugged. ‘As are many of his brothers.’
‘You seem remarkably sanguine.’
‘Worries are for the young.’
‘Old men dying with grace is what keeps the sheep in their pens and the wolves at the door.’
For all that they were used as metaphors in scripture wherever one looked, Mesring had never seen a wolf. They were the forest, the mountains, the night; the ancestral dread of upright apes that after a thousand generations of hive cities and nuclear winters still hadn’t lost a fear of the dark. They were what would emerge from the sump after the last lumen bulb sputtered out: not Chaos, but what Chaos made be.
Mesring blinked dizzily, realising that his voice was raised and echoing from the distant machinery, but also that a dying man couldn’t care less who he disturbed.
‘The Imperial Fists were destroyed, Vitori. It was Udo’s lie that put imposters bearing the black fist on their walls. My lie also. And Koorland upholds it.
The people believe in a lie. They are all lies.’
To his surprise, tears were running down his cheeks.
Mendelyev clasped his shoulder kindly. ‘The Ecclesiarch weeps. This is good. Unburden yourself of your sins.’
‘I weep because I want to take off Vangorich’s head and stick it on a pole!’
‘Speak to me, eminence. I am here to listen, to whatever it is you need to say.’
Mesring looked up at the scrape of approaching footsteps, but it was merely a passing sexton come to relight the candles. With a cough that brought up some more blood, he reached into the sweat-soiled inner pocket of his surplice and withdrew a glass vial. It was empty. He placed it on the prayer table in front of Mendelyev.
‘What is this?’ the confessor asked.
‘The Emperor’s turned back. Poison delivered by a penitent’s kiss. An Ecclesiarch bought for a few meagre days of life.’
‘Bought?’
‘My alchemist was able to extend the final dose that Wienand supplied, but no more.’ He gestured to the empty vial. ‘Tomorrow I will be dead.’ He hissed the final word as a sudden, clenching pain overtook his self-control. His vision ran like the paint of an underhive mission in the acid rain. Something warm trickled down the inside of his leg. The Beast’s emissary to Holy Terra’s orbit had been vanquished and Mesring no longer knew where to turn. ‘Without… a… miracle.’
As if on cue – a sign, he prayed, a sign that the Emperor truly does watch and forgive – the monolithic Gates of Undying that led, ultimately, to the Golden Throne Room itself were opened and a procession of frocked men and their entourage entered.
The cortege was led by a frater swinging a jewelled censer and followed out by vestal choristers in trailing robes. The clergy were escorted by Frateris Templar in gleaming carapace, marching with ceremonial gold-plated lasguns locked to their shoulder, the cold fire of force-bayonets flickering by their ears. Mesring couldn’t tell how many there were. His eyes were too bleary to count, his mind too fuzzy to hold a number, but after a few minutes the procession tailed off and the gates were barred, physically, by the towering figure of a lone Adeptus Custodes.
