by David Guymer
The shockwave hit Urquidex like a force stave and flung him back, up the aisle, and into the wall with a wetly organic crack. A numbing flash of excruciation centred somewhere around his upper spine, and he flopped to the floor minus the use of his limbs. His digitools gave a peripheral nervous twitch.
Courtesy of a massive opiate dump from his cortical implants he remained conscious, and quite by chance in a position that faced down the aisle.
The detonated psyker somehow still stood, wobbling on the spot, blood firing upwards in spurts from its splayed-open neck. The corpses of the escort squad lay in a psychic blast crater of tangled data-pews.
Vega was dead too, insofar as it was possible to make that determination. Urquidex had just noticed him when the ork that straddled him gave a jerk and violently evacuated the contents of its brainpan over a wide area of floor.
The ork slumped over the Space Marine and Urquidex smiled weakly. A string of wet detonations and splashes of red ran through the smoke. The psychic shock chained through the orks. Heads exploded. Inhuman souls blasted from hulking bodies. An ork mechanic staggered across the aisle, headless, guided on by his mega-armoured suit, and crashed through a stained glass window. Acid snow billowed through, pinching out the blooms of promethium fire that rose from the plummeting ork’s flamers. Through the open window, Urquidex heard something explode. A suddenly untended incendiary, perhaps? Or did the battle for Hyboriax Primus continue?
Inside the Apse Mechanicus, however, the silence was devastating. Urquidex heard a last bolt-casing tinkle to the ground. Colonel Rothi’s vox-set crackled with distant chatter. Icegrip clumped through the ruddy smoke and sniffed the air in search of more foes, and then gave a lopsided grin.
There were none.
Incus Maximal – orbital
Check 5, 2022:01:11
The rare strain of unfettered emotion swept the turreted command stations of Alcazar Remembered. Communications, auspectoriae, drive; men and women in glittering void suits rose from their fortress chairs, beating hands together and cheering. Even the cherubiam serfs in their null-shielded podia had fallen, if not quiet, then helplessly in with the general wave of elation. For once in their servile existences, the focus of their songs was not the warp-soothing verses of the Librarius, but the images and accompanying screed that scrolled across the main viewer.
‘Massive ork casualties,’ reported Kale, doing his best to keep his tone level and failing. A smile tugged at the corners of his lips and his hands were clasped a little more tightly than usual behind his back. ‘Early estimates from ground forces put their losses in the tens of thousands.’
Another wild cheer broke out. Even the old shipmaster allowed himself a smile. Koorland suppressed the desire to join the celebrations, or relax, and sat forward.
They had won nothing yet.
‘Details, magos.’
‘Noospheric interlink to Magos Urquidex’s data tether established,’ reported Laurentis, tinnily, unmoved by the exuberance of the tacticae staff around him, or by the serf who dropped onto her knees to throw a hug around his boxy chassis. ‘Stand by.’
The magos scuttled around the strategium desk, which had been modified to his own specifications. Twitching implementer rods projected a functional noosphere. A control board packed with dials hung lopsided from one end by a bundle of fibre-optics, and pinged with periodic sampling of said noosphere. Other parts did things that Koorland could not imagine, all under continuous manipulation by Laurentis’ mechadendrites.
‘My colleague reports partial success. Satisfactory. Reports of fighting in Hyboriax. Uplink from the Excoriators and other ground forces remains patchy, but it would appear that the blast effect was restricted to the Mons Primus and its immediate surrounds.’
Koorland glanced over to Thane. ‘Orbital facilties?’
‘Terminator squads heavily engaged, brother. No effect that I can tell.’
‘Bring them back aboard Alcazar Remembered, and then destroy those platforms. Send retrieval boats for Issachar’s force. I want helmet feeds compiled and supplied to Asger and Laurentis at once. Discontinue the blanket denial broadcast and begin ordering the fleet for immediate translation out.’
‘Aye, lord.’ The communications liaison serf slid her headphones back over her ears and sat back down, even as her station colleagues continued to celebrate.
‘I was hoping for more,’ Koorland muttered.
‘I will have to confer with Magos Urquidex and analyse the data gathered from the ground forces,’ said Laurentis. ‘Lord Tyris and any surviving members of the insertion will also need to be thoroughly interrogated. The psyker was the smallest and weakest of the three, however. That was why it was selected for a trial detonation. It is possible that further calibration of an admittedly improvised detonation procedure could result in improved blast yields.’
‘That is what I want, magos. It is what I need. More and better. I want to scour worlds. I want to ravage fleets. Do you understand me?’
‘I will commence data inload at once.’
‘I look forward to your preliminary report.’ Koorland turned to the communications turret. ‘Has the denial broadcast dissipated?’
‘Almost, lord.’
‘Then send word to the astropaths to make contact with Bohemond and Euclydeas. It is time for the final test.’
Eleven
Immitis VII – Moon
Check 9 [UNVERIFIED LOCATION], --:--:--
The psyker seized, bringing a haze of ferric red from the industrial clamps that held her pallet upright against the stone wall. Her scalp was stapled with adaptor plugs, dark cabling flexing and bowing as she struggled. Foam flecked her lips. Her eyes were wide and staring, though what it was that held her mind’s attention, Zerberyn could not hazard. In the matt of hoops and cabling above her, a lumen filament blinked on and off inside a cracked blue bulb. The witch’s fits were already becoming less frenzied, every abortive jerk against her restraints increasingly synchronised to that grubby flash of blue.
‘The soul is empty. It is dry. The green roar is heard across the stars. Drink deep of it. Drink deep.’
‘It is gibberish,’ said Zerberyn, a ghost-white giant encased in ceramite of unpainted grey.
‘The message doesn’t yet make sense to her,’ whispered the tonsured Librarius serf beside him. ‘Her mind is interpreting the psychic impulse as best as it is able.’
‘So far!’ she screamed, blood trickling from one nostril. ‘Why are you so far from home?’
More serfs in the plain grey habits of the Fists Exemplar Librarius hurried around her, making adjustments to flow regulators in her cranial plugs, tightening straps, or receiving instruction from the clicking instruments to which she was connected by peripheral and lumbar plugs. An overseer in baroque gunmetal-grey robes and bronze trim, a bondsman of sorts, offered sharp words of direction, but was largely content to let the serfs perform the labour. Various parts of his exposed flesh had been dug out and replaced with smooth iron grafts, presumably to excise the early stigmata of mutation. A brand of ownership, like a coal-black tattoo, was cut cleanly in half by one such metal plate on the side of his face.
The woman and her handler were the property of Warsmith Kalkator.
‘Are you even one of us, brother?’ The cage rattled with the violence of her efforts.
The words made Zerberyn’s neck itch, and the Iron Warriors bondsman growled instructions to his Fists Exemplar counterparts. Zerberyn looked up to where the cable bundle fed into a hole in the ceiling. White daylight fell through.
‘Join me,’ the psyker whispered, sinking into her restraints and turning her head sharply from side to side. ‘A red star. A world of fours.’
The overseer took her glistening wet hand, leant through the cage and listened as she whispered something in his ear.
‘We are the Last Wall. The Last Wall.
The Last Wall…’
It went on. Zerberyn swore.
‘Find me when she begins to talk sense.’ Zerberyn enclosed the Librarius serf’s shoulder in a gauntleted hand. He towered over the mortal. The barest effort on his part would have broken ribs, torn muscle, crushed a lung, and not a shred of guilt would have haunted him at having done so. The serf swallowed. ‘Tell only me.’
‘Only you, lord. Of course.’
The corridor from what they laughingly now called the astropathicum was a worn-out stretch of ferrocrete blocks with freeze-thaw cracks in the mortar. Stacked building materials littered the floor, runes painted next to gashes in the wall or partial collapses of the ceiling with colours that indicated priority. Doorways without doors led to side chambers where serfs of the two Chapters – Legions? Zerberyn had ceased to worry over how he and his allies described one another – conducted basic repairs. In others, surplus equipment from Guilliman, Excelsior, Paragon, Courageous, Implicit, and from Palimodes had been stockpiled. Paired quartermaster serfs, one from each affiliation, took inventory, assessing how their meagre resources might be most efficiently shared.
From one, the scent of counterseptic hit Zerberyn well before his dully echoing footsteps carried him to the threshold. A dozen muscular youths from the local slave stock were laid on gurneys, stripped down, unconscious. One had been opened up, blood splattering his surgical robes in a perfect line from his throat to his sternum. Apothecary Reoch said nothing as Zerberyn walked past his door, giving him only the sullen flash of binoptics above an expressionless metal grille.
A short set of steps curved downwards forty-five degrees to the left. Zerberyn could not help but admire the design’s innate defensibility, based on the premise that ninety per cent of mortal human assailants would prefer to wield a close-combat weapon in their right hand.
It led to an archway large enough to accommodate a Terminator. The ferrocrete was sanded smooth.
Zerberyn walked through it and a sweeping turret opened out before him, large enough to land a Stormbird or to site heavy artillery. Its two-metre-high ramparts followed three-quarters of the circumference of a circle, until each end cut into the sides of the mountain into which the Iron Warriors had built their old fortress.
Sentinel servitors with low-oxygen enhancements looked out over the feeble atmosphere. Thousands of effluviam stacks broke the thin layer to belch toxic waste gases directly into the void. Behind the swaddling layer, the storm-wracked bulk of the gas giant Immitis VII seethed like a judgemental eye.
From the echoes of hammering, drilling and welding, Zerberyn knew that Forge-Brother Clathrin and his Iron Warriors counterpart would be conducting the serious work of shoring up the outer perimeter, retrofitting the back-up void bank hacked out of Implicit’s systems into the old fort’s age-withered grids. The older men of the manufactory slaves, the women, the younger boys, trimmed wires, sawed timber, shaped stone. The occasional whimper or cracked lash echoed up through the layered fortifications.
Zerberyn found the forced labour distasteful, but it was hardly the worst thing he had done in the name of necessity since becoming de facto lord of the Fists Exemplar. They had been slaves of the Iron Warriors long before his arrival, so what harm had he brought them? None.
He squinted in the dim, but unaccustomed daylight as Epistolary Honorius and Kalkator’s Apothecary, Barban, approached him.
Honorius was wearing Terminator plate without a helmet, his pale face like a pearl in a hard, dark shell of constrictor rings and armoured cabling. The Epistolary was paler even than Zerberyn, which was in itself disconcerting. Zerberyn’s skin was without pigment as he was the child of a world whose sun could kill, but Honorius was more ancient than he, and his recruitment predated the settlement of Eidolica by five centuries. His eyes, by contrast, were as black as the void beyond the Astronomican. He was a pressure on the psyche, a force against Zerberyn’s mind. Flickers of what could otherwise only be sensed steamed from the immensity of his armour plate like the corona of an eclipse.
Zerberyn aside, no one had worked more closely alongside their new allies than the Epistolary.
‘What news?’ said Honorius. The subtle power woven through the old warrior’s deep voice never failed to give Zerberyn pause.
‘Nothing yet. But it is the Last Wall.’
‘Then the fight continues. Good.’
‘Of course it continues. Do you think that brothers of ours would surrender?’
‘Do you intend to rejoin them?’ said Barban.
The Apothecary’s gunmetal and bronze battleplate was extensively modified and appended with bionics. A pair of bulky, muscular youths, perhaps eleven or twelve standard years of age, hovered behind him. They looked sickly from blood loss and enforced genhancement. There had been no time to assess the men for worth or for biological compatibility. As much as they needed strong walls, they needed strong warriors to hold them. Zerberyn examined the two neophytes. Their throats and chests were scarred from the implantation procedure. Both were already showing bruise-like discolourations to their skin, the first dermal deposits that would, over time, develop into the black carapace that would enable them to wear power armour. Zerberyn could not tell just from looking whether they were Iron Warriors or Fists Exemplar.
Presumably Reoch knew.
Zerberyn drilled the Iron Warrior with his gaze. Neither spoke.
‘My lord!’ came the relieved gasp of the Librarius adjutant, stumbling down the steps and onto the sunlit rampart. He offered the Epistolary a low bow and turned breathlessly to Zerberyn with his report. ‘The communication is from Euclydeas, lord.’
‘The Chapter Master of the Soul Drinkers,’ said Honorius, one eyebrow lifted, peeling the infinite black lens a little wider. ‘Our absent brothers join the war. Perhaps all is not yet lost.’
‘What does it say?’ said Zerberyn.
‘A call for aid. They are beset, lord, by orks in great number.’
‘How far?’
‘The next system. Coreward.’
‘Reachable,’ said Honorius.
‘Just,’ Zerberyn corrected. Barban was watching them both without expression, as though assessing their decision. ‘Tell no one of this,’ he said, turning to the mortal serf. ‘You are to ignore all further attempts at communication from this source.’
‘But lord–’ Honorius began before falling silent.
On some deep, human level, it troubled Zerberyn that one so ancient and powerful could be silenced by a glance from him.
‘We are not ready yet, brother,’ he said, listening to the sounds of forced labour that continued far below his feet. ‘When we are strong again, then we will make our presence known.’
‘Peace is an armistice in a war that is continuously going on.’
– the remembrancer Thucydides, pre-M0
Twelve
The void
The conference room aboard Alcazar Remembered was as puritanical as Koorland had come to expect. It was oval in shape, its walls bare metal, its space dominated by a sturdy metal table and chairs enough for fifty warriors of the Adeptus Astartes. Hololith crystals studded the unpolished surface at intervals, returning the dim illumination of the ceiling lumen points like chipped glass. It was in this room that an argument over whether orbital barrage or drop strike was the surer method of pacifying the capital world of the abhuman Kivor Enclavium had famously brought Oriax Dantalion and Sigismund to blows, Koorland had learned (Shipmaster Weylon Kale being a remarkably informed historian). ‘I knew there was some life to these stone men,’ the Death Lord, Mortarion, commander of the compliance mission, was reported to have said as he pulled brother from brother.
If true, it was a damning indictment of them all, and another story altogether.
Two dozen Deathwatch sergeants were gathered in and around the available chairs. Koorland recognised the Raven Guard, Tyris, w
ho had performed so superbly on Incus Maximal, in muted conversation with a Brazen Claw who must have travelled with Abhorrence, for Koorland did not know his name. The red-haired Wolf, Kjarvik, laughed harshly over the subdued chatter at some tale of Asger’s. The Watch Commander, for reasons known best to himself, had his boot on Oriax Dantalion’s austere table, hands afloat in demonstration of some grapple manoeuvre.
Issachar and Thane walked amongst them, speaking little, thus far avoiding a reprise of Sigismund and Dantalion’s infamous bout.
Field-Legatus Otho Dorr of the Ullanor Veterans, Astra Militarum, stood against a wall and sipped at a glass of clear wine. It was a plant fermentation product formulated to complement the nutrient gruel favoured by the Fists Exemplar. Despite all that he had survived on Ullanor and before, a social encounter with so many looming Adeptus Astartes clearly had him mortified. If he was hoping for the wine to loosen some of those nerves then he was due another disappointment. Intoxication was but one of the many things that the Fists Exemplar disapproved of.
Confessor-Militant Rawketh was arguably a natural companion under such circumstances, but the commander of the freshly raised Ecclesiarchy drafts stood alone by the viewports, captivated by the massed bow lights and engine flares of the combined fleets.
Phaeton Laurentis’ attempts at making small talk with Weylon Kale and Dominus Gerg Zhokuv appeared to be a waste of the magos’ synthised breath. The brain of the ancient dominus bubbled thoughtfully in its armoured jar. Kale, meanwhile, listened politely, but was finding it difficult to keep himself every few seconds from checking the vox-pin in his collar or glancing at the ship lights in the viewports. The coordinates Koorland had provided them were deep inside the orks’ burgeoning empire. The old shipmaster felt the phantom itch of sensor ghosts on the back of his neck whenever he turned his back on the viewports.
Two seats around from the table’s head, Kavalanera Brassanas sat, straight-backed, straight-armed, hands flat on the table, staring into the nothing between her and the bulkhead and through it to the fleet anchorage beyond. Wienand laid a hand on the knight abyssal’s shoulder and whispered something in her ear as she sat down beside her. The inquisitor’s aides spoke around them, exchanging slates, comparing notes, while the Assassin, Krule, lowered himself into the chair directly opposite. His muscles were tensed, his jaw firm, seemingly set on matching the Sister’s light-year stare and rising high in Koorland’s estimation simply for possessing the self-belief to imagine that he could.
