by David Guymer
Dominated by light infantry, the Gardinaal were decimated.
The effect on the Imperial Army was comparable.
The Primarch of the Iron Tenth was not given to introspection or self-doubt. The endless cycles of codification and re-analysis that must have occupied Guilliman's every moment held no interest for him. Neither did he possess the patience for the moral quandaries that Vulkan or Corax or even Fulgrim indulged prior to a campaign to restore a reluctant diaspora to the Terran fold.
There was only one way to wage war, and that was to do it totally, with every tool and weapon at his disposal employed to their absolute.
His way.
The violet aurorae began to burn off, a spasming flicker of void light that came in sympathy to the dusty rattle and sputter of small arms in the killing ground below. Ferrus Manus boarded his Land Raider. It was an Achilles-Alpha variant. Its hull armour was wound with wyrms and wyverns, its sponson mounts bearing the silver fist of the Iron Hands. The primarch's personal standard tore over the belching fumes of the vehicle's exhausts. A skirt of heavy iron scales hung over its lower section of track. It was a thing of powerful beauty, but it was still, first and foremost, a tank.
He called it Godhammer.
The Land Raider slammed into a barrier of dead flesh. Its tracks squealed, chewing into the corpses of Gardinaal soldiers and spitting out gore and gristle, slewing side to side and coating its skirts with crimson paste. But solid matter could be compressed only so far, and even the ferromantic vigour of Godhammer could only drive it so hard.
The forward assault ramp slapped down. Ferrus Manus stamped hard until the bodies blocking its proper deployment had been flattened sufficiently for him to emerge.
He filled his enormous lungs. Fyceline. Promethium. Ozone. Death on an apocalyptic scale. He gave a grunt of satisfaction as his honour guard finally managed to force their own way free of the Land Raider to join him. Five Terminators of the First Order; a Land Raider could accommodate no more of the warriors alongside a primarch. Harik Morn led them. His armour still carried the scars of the explosion, but the injury to his flesh was nothing that a genhanced physique and the demand for immediate retribution could not overcome. Veneratii Urien would fight on from a body of iron, but this day had come too soon for him.
'Leave nothing,' said Ferrus.
'With pleasure,' Morn answered coldly.
More transports smacked wetly into the killing field as the primarch pushed ahead. Rhinos and Land Raiders drove into the meat wall. Massive Spartans ploughed further, disgorging scores of warriors at a time. The Cataphractii of Clan Avernii waded into the dead to tear into stranded war machines. The grimly armoured Destroyers of Clan Vurgaan blasted a path with volkite and phosphex. The two clans' bitter rivalry and recent history were shackled by their common fury over the fate of Veneratii Urien and by the driving spear-tip of their primarch.
And the Gardinaal could not stand before it.
The ancient Lords of the Gardinaal, massive in their mortuary war-plate, sought to marshal the retreat, but Ferrus Manus bestrode their world like a colossus.
Every blow of his hammer left crab walkers crippled and war machines haemorrhaging smoke from their ruin. Bullets ricocheted harmlessly off his armour. Beams bent and blades turned against his flesh. Men died unnamed and uncounted. He was war. War at its most brutal. No voice cheered him, for few welcomed the coming of war, but his towering presence drew vigour from the spent muscles of his allies and tore down the fog of evolutionary selection and drugs that had blinded the Gardinaal to fear. Ferrus lifted his hammer aloft and roared for retribution as DuCaine, Cicerus and Demeter all discovered a last reserve of strength to see his will done.
This world would be uninhabitable for centuries, but he was not mankind's liberator.
He was their conqueror.
First Palatine. First Blade of the Two Hundred. Fulgrim's Firstborn. There was no warrior fraternity to which he was member in which Akurduana's name was not counted first. Another might have watched the passage of the likes of Eidolon and Vespassian to a Lord Commander's laurels from his languishment as a mere captain of Second Company and taken it as an insult to an extraordinary talent. He knew what his talents were, and yes, they were extraordinary, but he knew his flaws just as keenly. Fulgrim, infinite in his affection for his children, had let it be known that no warrior called to fight with the Palatine Blades as often as Akurduana could be burdened with high command. The truth was that he was half the leader that Solomon Demeter already was. A totem, perhaps. An inspiration, maybe. Humble, never, until a primarch had force-fed him an overdue share.
He drew Timur from the body of the final guard and allowed the mortal to sink quietly to the ground amongst his dozen or so comrades.
The wind at the tower's roof was cinder-hot and furious, rising from the lava sea and the firefight below. It tugged at his warrior braid as he checked over his shoulder. Humming with a tunelessness that would have enraged him not so long ago, he knelt to set the charges.
There was no pain. The drugs in Tull's system had seen to that. The ground beneath him was lumpy, but not at all uncomfortable. The fact that it was the body armour of friends and comrades registered somewhere, but couldn't lodge; his mind was smooth, and seemed to be ballooning by the moment.
He stared up at the fortified control tower that the Gardinaal had given their last to hold, but it couldn't hold his attention. He no longer cared.
He saw Cicerus. Flames danced around the Ultramarine's ankles as he was dragged under by a mob of ogreish gene-breds. He saw Amar. Arcs of psychic energy leapt from his flaming sword and through the tight-packed Gardinaal soldiers. They burned by the hundred. A single bullet to his unhelmed head put him down. He saw Demeter shouting. The III Legion warrior was screaming, exhorting, even now. He could see DuCaine too. The veteran drove the Iron Hands into the Gardinaal's guns like a 'dozer blade.
It was time for mortals to step aside. It was time for the superhumans to wage war.
Tanks and fire and ungodly angels spun away from him as his vision swam, a blur of shape and colour streaked with black. The colour of Medusa. The colour of death. After what felt like a few seconds, but was clearly longer, his vision cleared. He found himself, by accident or design, looking directly at Ferrus Manus.
The primarch was wrath made manifest, an avatar of the Emperor's desire for conquest, clad in sutured iron.
A crab-like superheavy walker crunched through the Space Marines' fire. Its bulk hung over the primarch. Like a planet above its moon. It raised a chipped and bolter-ravaged limb, but one of Ferrus' Terminator guard managed to heave the embattled primarch aside before the limb crashed down. Ferrus roared his outrage. He grabbed the limb, a man's width of armoured hydraulics, and crushed it in his hand. The walker struggled for a moment in Ferrus' grip, a scene from Grekan myth as man drew in arthropoidal Titan and broke it under his hammer.
Tull felt his spirit settle, finally giving up on something that had been denying it peace.
Astartes psychology had fascinated him for years. Their existence was so removed from that of mortal men: their bodies had been strengthened, their lifespans lengthened, their emotions engineered to rob them of fear and doubt and to reshape them to their primarch's template. They had been made for war and nothing else, their psychologies shaped by the scope of the changes wrought upon them. And finally Tull felt he understood. The Space Marines were as different from him as either would be from an ork or an eldar. They were nothing alike. And the primarchs were an order of magnitude more distant again.
Ferrus Manus was headstrong, prideful, uncompromising, inhumane, as flawed as any human being, but taken to such superhuman extremes that it took a dying man to see them as flaws. With that realisation came one more. His last.
He was as incomprehensible to Ferrus as Ferrus was to him.
It wasn't a reassuring thought, but he still believed.
He had to.
And this time, his eyes didn't reopen.
> Gardinaal Prime's orbital bands were clogged with debris. Corroded junk tech left over from five thousand years of exploitation, rubble from the mineral extraction from its moons. The field had oriented over the millennia into a nascent ring system, aligned to the planet's magnetic field and rotation, the entire region of supra-orbital debris saturated with radiation. The fleet augurs of the 52nd and the 413th, and of the Aspect Voyager, the Rogue Trader vessel that had rediscovered the Gardinaal system for the Imperium in 858.M30, had all detected the emissions, extrapolated the decay rate and come to the same conclusion: that the radiation was the trace residual from the atomic devices used to crack open the planet's exhausted satellites about sixteen hundred years before.
They were all half right.
In response to the unanimous code approvals of the last Lords of the Gardinaal, a ring of low-orbital platforms came sluggishly to life. Radiation signatures spiked as shielding was lowered, launch doors opened, and firing mechanisms that had lain dormant in space for about sixteen hundred years warmed through. Attitude impellers frothed, the weapons platforms each manoeuvring towards a single target.
An insular imperium of eleven worlds, the Lords of the Gardinaal had never given serious credence to a threat from without.
Their final solution had been devised accordingly.
The approach to the command tower was a tangled maze of razor wire, hung with debris and the dead of the Gardinaal and Legiones Astartes alike. Not in equal measure, far from it, for they were not equal, but near enough to stoke Perms' distemper.
The Gardinaal's mortuary walkers carved up the killing ground between them, essentially impervious to anything more delicate than a Titan or a primarch. Infantry and automated turrets compounded their positional advantage with weight of fire. A squad of Thousand Sons managed to drive a single walker off with repeated lashes of psychic power. An Ultramarine Dreadnought grappled another, his chassis creaking as the mortuary engine's strength tore it slowly in half and all around him his brothers fell.
Ferrus heard a scratch, like nails drawn across ceramite, coming from his gorget, he ignored it, looking up as, in a splintering of iron gravel, the mighty Warhound Canis Luna swivelled its arm batteries towards the command tower and unleashed. The barrage of its mega bolters bruised the structure's shields, but nothing more.
It was the heart of the Gardinaal's defiance and Ferrus Manus wanted it rubble.
He made to establish a vox link to the Firebrands' princeps, only being forced to attend to the insistent scratch from the vox pearl under his gorget. He activated it with a grunt.
'My lord.' The voice was Shipmaster Laeric's, a note of anxiety to it that Ferrus had never associated with the Fist of Iron's mortal caretaker. The sounds of panicked command operations piggybacked the line. 'We're picking up a number of orbital signatures targeting your co-ordinates.'
'Destroy them.'
Ferrus lowered his hammer and allowed his Terminator guard to push ahead. Above them Canis Luna hungrily reloaded, gorging on ammo belts as though they were raw meat and spattering the Iron Hands with spent casings.
'Escorts are moving to intercept, lord. But we can't acquire accurate solutions in the radiation field, and we can't manoeuvre capital ships into the rings. I've ordered fighters recalled, but there's no time to refuel or rearm, and… my lord, I think—'
'How many weapons?'
Silence for a moment. 'It's going to make what hit the 413th look like a warning shot.'
With the fastidiousness and speed of a primarch, Ferrus took stock.
Bolts and beamers made a deadly crisscross of the air. The Legiones Astartes drove into it yet, spearheaded by the might of the X Legion, every metre gained drawing more doggedness and resolve from the taking than the last. It was brutally hot. The older-Mark power armours were beginning to whine and even seize with the radiation. The molecular disruption fields of power weapons sizzled constantly.
The command tower was the heart of the Gardinaal's defiance That much was plain. But why? Was it crucial to the operation of their orbital weapons, or did the Gardinaal expect its reinforced structure and shielding to withstand the coming holocaust? Or was there no rationale; was this naught but a dying attempt to make this a pyrrhic triumph for the Imperium of Man, to strike at a distant Emperor by destroying the one thing he loved and could not replace - one of his sons?
His admiration for the Gardinaal grew.
'They raised the storm.'
'Lord?'
'Move Fist of Iron into the rings. Ram her into every last rock if that is what it takes.'
'Aye, lord.'
He cut the link.
'No relent!' Ferrus bellowed, raising Forgebreaker high. 'Fight to your last drop of strength or die here today. Wait for no man who cannot continue!' Taking his hammer two-handed and preparing to charge, he heard his vox scratch again. 'What?'
'Above you, my lord primarch.'
Ferrus growled in surprise, but true to his own command barrelled into the Gardinaal as he did so. His raw power broke them, equivalent to being rammed by a Land Raider. 'Akurduana? Where have you been?'
'Look up.'
A multilaser mounted on an automated sentry pod a few metres along the defence line opened up on him. His armour soaked up the hail of las, and Forgebreaker crushed the multi-barrelled weapon into its tripod. Then Ferrus looked up.
The captain of Second Company flickered, the purple flame of a beacon, darting around the base of the dish array at the summit of the command tower without ever really moving at all. Even injured, his swords were smoke, and the soldiers of the Gardinaal that charged up onto the roof to end him fell away like ash. 'How did you get up there?'
'When you are but one of two hundred, you learn that one man can go places a thousand cannot.' Grunts and the clang of steel momentarily occupied the line.'The Third Legion takes its share of losses, but by the grace of the Emperor we take fewer.'
'Can you disable that dish?'
'It is in hand,' Akurduana laughed. 'Consider this my oath upheld.'
'You will make the Emperor a mighty regent one day. Let us hope he never requires one.'
'Akurduana. What are you—?'
The frequency broke from the captain's end. Ferrus wasted several furious seconds attempting to force its reinstatement, before abandoning the effort.
It had become suddenly, staggeringly futile.
A white flash ignited the dish array's rockcrete base. It was barely noticeable, little more than a spark, but it set off a shockwave that rippled through the dish, disintegrating metal and rockcrete as it went. A mushrooming plume of fire succeeded the initial wave, cremating every last particle that had, through the fractions of a second between the instigating flash and this, still resembled a complete dish. Not anymore. The fireball caught the front of the shockwave and rebounded back.
The upper hundred metres of the tower exploded, as if an Elemental had just been born within.
The suddenness and scale of the eruption brought a brief, stunned lull to the fighting. Exhausted legionaries looked up, their visors darkening so as to maintain visual acuity while staring into the exuberant blaze. Ferrus felt its burn in his metallic eyes. The Gardinaal looked up too.
'My lord, we've lost the weapons signatures. I think that—'
Ferrus cut off the shipmaster with a snarl.
It began with one.
An infantryman that had been facing off against DuCaine's Clan Sorrgol veterans threw his rifle at the Lord Commander's feet. His unit followed, then the company, the battalion. By the time the clatter of falling rifles had reached the guns of the sentry posts and the crew of the battered Gardinaal war machines it was a wave that could not be resisted. Surrounded by it, finally breaking under it, the lords of the Gardinaal lowered their weapons systems. Their walker suits shrank with a hiss of fluid hydraulics. Their shields sputtered out.
Covering his eyes with his hand, Ferrus dug fingers into his temples and growled.
He
could feel the migraine returning, the need to answer his pain received with pain given. But there was an old Terran saying - about cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.
He let the anger rasp through his lips as he gave the final order, the order that would forever more become synonymous with the compliance of the Gardinaal.
'It is done.'
THIRTEEN
The X Legion stood attentive in centuries. Blocs of a hundred, ten by ten, every warrior clad in his finest. Their armour had been lapped and polished until it sparkled like glass. Laurels had been affixed. Silver gleamed. Bolters were clenched to chests in fists of flawless black or of cool, oiled steel, and shone under the luminous gems of the Practice Hall as though each legionary bore a token of precious silver. Every tenth century, warriors of the III and XIII Legions provided a subdued injection of colour. In all, three hundred centuries of Legiones Astartes stood in fullest glory, and yet if Ferrus Manus were to close his eyes there would be nothing but the consonant hum of thirty thousand suits of power armour to betray them. They were as silent as the dead.
'I am imperfect,' he murmured, voice too low for the ears of any but a primarch to hear.
'What is this, brother?' Fulgrim had come draped in sombre finery, the purple of his magnificent ceremonial plate muted with matt lacquers and sanative oils. 'It is unlike you to be maudlin.'
Ferrus grunted as the great doors at the distant end of the Hall were hauled aside with minimal fanfare. A procession of grim armoured figures marched through, their heads bared as a final mark of respect. Iron Hands predominated, but there were Emperor's Children, Ultramarines and even one of the surviving Thousand Sons amongst their number. They bore a bier between them. On it lay three leaden caskets.
Fulgrim followed his gaze.
'Do you believe that even the First Expedition Fleet never suffers a casualty?'
Ferrus said nothing. With eyes of restless silver he watched as the caskets passed the observant centuries towards the dais that had been erected for the primarchs to commemorate their children's sacrifice.
