The Atonement of Fire

by David Annandale

  Contents

  Cover

  The Atonement of Fire – David Annandale

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  The Atonement of Fire

  David Annandale

  Imprimis: the compliance of Diavanos was entirely peaceful. It was, and is, a reminder that our Crusade is first and foremost not about conquest, but about bringing illumination to the galaxy. The people of Diavanos greeted the promulgation of the Imperial Truth with rejoicing. (Addendum: The enthusiasm did, in some quarters, approach religious fervour, up to and including claims of fulfilled prophecy. Noting and countering this tendency immediately proved effective, and it is to be regretted that early detection was not possible on Khur.)

  Secundo: despite their long isolation during the Age of Strife, the people of Diavanos managed to maintain a rich culture. Impressions formed by walking the streets of the capital, Ecstasia, are dominated by the pronounced elegance of the stained-glass towers, whose survival to the present day is remarkable.

  Tertio: Diavanos’ contributions to the Crusade post-compliance have been substantial. Over and above its considerable mining industries, it has provided a disproportionately high number of remembrancers.

  Conclusion: Diavanos presents a number of characteristics, apparent during its initial compliance and since, that make it a model of the Imperium’s achievement.

  – Guilliman, Notes on Diavanos:

  Compliance and Aftermath, clvi

  I

  The Matter of Sin

  The Lord of Ultramar paced the circumference of the Reclusiam on the battleship Ultimus Mundi. Lumen globes in sconces kept the chamber in a perpetual deep twilight, conducive to meditation. Fluted columns rose every thirty-six degrees around the wide circle of the space. The designs of their crowns varied very slightly from one to the next, inviting the eye and concentrating the mind. In the centre of the Reclusiam, Chaplain Volusius remained perfectly still. When he spoke, his voice was low, the murmur of a deep river, prompting Guilliman’s flow of reflection.

  ‘Is the sin beyond forgiveness?’ Volusius asked.

  ‘The Imperium Secundus was usurpation,’ said Guilliman. ‘Intentions do not matter when the crime is this great. We do not forgive treachery.’

  ‘This was not treachery. Treachery implies intent.’

  ‘That hardly lessens the gravity of usurpation.’

  ‘It alters the nature of the sin,’ said Volusius. ‘And you did not answer the question of forgiveness directly.’

  ‘I did not,’ Guilliman admitted.

  ‘You seek forgiveness?’

  ‘I desire it.’

  ‘The Emperor’s or your own?’ the Chaplain probed.

  ‘It isn’t a question of receiving forgiveness,’ said Guilliman. ‘It is a question of earning it.’

  ‘Earned through self-denial? By not returning to Terra, you turn away from the possibility of receiving the Emperor’s forgiveness directly.’

  Guilliman shook his head, uneasy. ‘Our strategy is dictated by the practical. Sanguinius must confront Horus. That is his destiny.’ Acknowledging the reality of fate was still difficult, but he had seen too much now to do otherwise. ‘The Blood Angels must reach Terra. The break in the Ruinstorm is a narrow one. The immaterium is still too violent for long jumps, and the traitors will seek to ambush the Ninth Legion. Our fleet is the largest and most able to engage the forces that will try to stop Sanguinius.’ Of this much he was sure.

  ‘There is no other reason for this choice?’ said Volusius.

  Guilliman did not answer.

  ‘How is forgiveness earned?’ the Chaplain asked again.

  ‘By preserving my father’s dream,’ said Guilliman.

  II

  The Matter of Atonement

  Madness clutched at the fleet. It found no grip, repelled by Geller fields. It slid against the hull of every battleship, cruiser and escort, screaming frustration and trailing flames of murdered colours. Scores of ships cut through the empyrean with a directness of purpose long denied them, rushing towards a threefold mission. They would strike in support of another fleet. They would strike in the name of salvation. And they would strike in the name of vengeance.

  In the strategium of the battleship Ultimus Mundi, the Lord of Ultramar contemplated the fragility of dreams, and the nightmare of force needed to preserve them.

  ‘We’ll be fortunate if anything of Diavanos remains,’ Titus Prayto said. It seemed that he, too, had been thinking about fragility. The Librarian shook his head. ‘It is not a world that could withstand the attention of the Twelfth Legion for long.’

  ‘The cry for help the astropathic choirs intercepted is a recent one,’ Drakus Gorod pointed out. ‘If Diavanos was able to get a message out, then the World Eaters have only just arrived.’

  Guilliman thought for a moment, then he tapped the controls of the tacticarium table. The hololithic display of the threatened world became a map of the subsector with Diavanos’ system at the core. ‘We may be the indirect cause of the attack,’ he said, making a further adjustment. The trajectory of the Blood Angels fleet towards Terra appeared, along with the known positions of traitor blockades.

  ‘Our first report of the World Eaters fleet placed it to the galactic east of Diavanos,’ Guilliman said.

  ‘They know the Blood Angels are coming,’ Gorod said. ‘Diavanos is an excellent staging ground for an ambush on the route Sanguinius must take.’

  ‘That is a new redeployment then,’ said Prayto. ‘There may be hope for Diavanos yet.’

  ‘Destruction and hope,’ Guilliman told his sons. ‘We are the bearers of both.’

  It was hope that obsessed him. Prayto must have seen it in his face, or perhaps the same thoughts haunted the Librarian. ‘It would mean much to preserve this world,’ he said.

  ‘It is what the Imperium can be,’ Guilliman said. It is part of my atonement, he thought. He would not see it fall to Angron’s monsters.

  And if he did save it, if in this present moment he preserved the world’s past and its future, and did so in service to opening the way for Sanguinius and the salvation of Terra, then that would be another step towards his personal atonement. He did not think he would ever truly expiate the sin of the Imperium Secundus. But saving Diavanos was important in practical and symbolic terms.

  He returned to the practical now. He studied the trajectories of the Ultramarines and Blood Angels fleets. Timing their movements was approximate. It would have been even if the warp were not in turmoil. But the distance to Diavanos was short in galactic terms. ‘The World Eaters will need to be moving out of the system if they hope to intercept Sanguinius,’ he said. ‘Their emergence will have to coincide closely with our translation at the Mandeville point. We will act accordingly. I want the fleet in attack formation, weapons ready. We shall be the arrival of lightning.’

  The ships of the XIII Legion stormed out of the warp, and they were both gladius and shield. Their formation was impenetrable, their numbers so great that there could be no hope of going around them. And they struck with a violence that cut the night of the void open with terrible light. They emerged with torpedoes in launch tubes, cannons loaded and lances primed, already looking for the enemy.

  The enemy were where Guilliman had foreseen they would be. The World Eaters had left Diavanos behind, and were just beyond the orbit of the outermost planet of the system. Their ships were close together. The Ultramarines came at them from the port flank. Gui
lliman’s fleet was more than twice the size of that the World ­Eaters had mustered, its front wider than the length of the XII Legion’s formation.

  Finally, Guilliman thought. Finally, we strike you traitors as you deserve to be struck.

  The civilisation-killing barrage from the Ultramarines hit along the entire flank of the World Eaters fleet. A coronal chain of fire blasted across the traitor ships. The darkness blazed with explosions and the flare of overwhelmed void shields.

  ‘A strong thrust,’ Guilliman said as the blinding glare filled the oculus. ‘We have cut them deeply.’

  Battleships and grand cruisers survived the initial moments of the barrage, but the smaller vessels were less fortunate. Catastrophe roared through their hulls. The cruisers Galerus and Clavam died immediately. The Galerus’ engines ruptured. Multiple torpedo and cannon hits from the Gauntlet of Power vaporised the forward third of the Clavam, and its ordnance exploded at once. Twin suns shone in the centre of the fleet. The titanic plasma explosions washed over the other ships, compounding damage, taking out the frigate Bellicose and crippling the battle-barge Iaculum.

  The bridge of the Ultimus Mundi erupted with shouts of ‘For Calth! For the Five Hundred Worlds!’

  ‘It is good to see them burn,’ said Gorod.

  ‘Burning is too merciful for them,’ Guilliman said. ‘But you’re right. These are pyres that have been long in coming.’

  The World Eaters responded to the attack eagerly. Their ships turned slowly. Their grace and majesty was due to their immense mass, and belied the bloodthirsty madness of the monsters who commanded them. Their weapons were fast, though, and the fury of the XII Legion hit back against the righteousness of the XIII. Angron’s sons tore across battlefields like maddened beasts, yet they still possessed the discipline of warriors. They knew how to respond to the great fleet that had come for them. As the burning vessels turned, weathering the unending barrage, they did not break formation. The devastating shock waves unleashed from the slain ships were a huge push outwards. The fleet could easily have lost all coherence, wounded beasts lashing out from the collapsing centre. Instead, the World Eaters tightened their formation, all the while maintaining ferocious retaliatory fire from their broadsides. Bleeding flame, rents in their hulls spilling freezing gases and bodies into the void, the monuments to savagery drew closer and closer together, altering their trajectories until they were bow to bow with the Ultra­marines, and the fleet had become a battering ram.

  The system’s sun was a distant, tiny spark of blue-tinted white, so far away it stood out from other stars only by the intensity of its light. Its cold eye faded beside the fury that had erupted in the far reaches of its system. The Legion fleets clashed with the force of a nova, a vast, roaring aurora of crimson and violet surrounding the vessels. The violence of the battle seemed as if it should tear open a new rift in the materium. With their fire heavily concentrated, the World Eaters hammered the Ultramarines’ wall. They destroyed the Rectitude and the Integritas and the Objective Truth. The grand cruiser Infestus accounted for two of the killing blows before it perished in its turn. The nova grew brighter still, and the World Eaters’ battering ram began to lose coherence. It failed to break through the line of the XIII Legion. More ships died or fell back, engines damaged and unable to keep up the charge.

  On the bridge of the Ultimus Mundi, Guilliman tracked the advance of the battle, consumed by the demands of the immediate moments across the fleet. His sons acquitted themselves as he knew they would. Every piece of the primarch’s colossal war machine acted in consonance with the purpose of the whole, and the purpose was devastation. Guilliman ordered adjustments to individual trajectories that cumulatively became the movement of the advancing wall. The fleet closed with the World Eaters­ as a unified, unyielding whole, and Guilliman viewed the enemy as a single, great beast, assessing moment to moment which blow was needed to bring it down.

  As individual vessels fell away from the whole, he shifted his focus away from them, leaving them to the elements of the fleet that were tasked to finish them off. When the battleship Gladiator veered away from the formation, its port flank blackened and pulsing with flame and flickering power levels, he gave a slight nod, satisfied to see the fleet’s leader taken from the fight. He did not let himself be lulled by the hope that this represented a decapitation of the World Eaters. They would fight to their last, brutal drop of blood. Because he was not distracted by the Gladiator, he saw that the Bringer of Ruin took over command of the formation from the centre, and he directed the Ultimus Mundi and the Triumph of Espandor to bring a new concentration of fire against it.

  Because the Gladiator had left the front line of the void battle, Guilliman did not follow where it went as the distance between it and the XIII Legion grew. Because he did not follow it, he was able to mark the moment that the current of the battle became definitive. The World Eaters still fought, and drew blood, but there was nothing they could do. The Ultramarines’ wall curved around them and tightened, closing off all avenues of escape. The beginning of the end of the struggle had come.

  We have cleared your path for you, Sanguinius, Guilliman thought. We will do so again. You will reach Terra.

  Then Iasus, Chapter Master of the 22nd aboard the strike cruiser Cavascor was on the vox. ‘The Gladiator is making for Diavanos,’ Iasus said. ‘We are in pursuit.’

  Guilliman saw what the commander of the World Eaters­ was doing. The traitor also knew that the battle was lost. And he saw how to strike one last, festering blow. The symbolism of Diavanos was as clear to the World Eaters as it was to the Ultramarines.

  ‘The World Eaters cannot let the promise of Diavonos survive,’ said Prayto, echoing Guilliman’s thoughts.

  ‘Can you close with the enemy in time?’ Guilliman asked Iasus.

  ‘We have engaged it, but its defences are holding. Lord ­primarch, we will destroy it, but not before it burns Diavanos. I have ordered a Caestus boarding attack.’

  ‘Prepare two assault rams,’ Guilliman ordered. To Gorod he said, ‘Gather an Invictus squad. We are teleporting to the Cavascor. Diavanos has not seen its final dawn. I swear this in my father’s name.’

  Gorod blinked. ‘You will lead the attack?’

  ‘I will preserve Diavanos with my bare hands if I have to.’ And I will exact a reprisal of flesh for the Five Hundred Worlds, he thought. He was glad it was the Cavascor that was pursuing the Gladiator. Iasus commanded the Destroyers. The brutality of their way of war would be fitting justice for the World Eaters.

  ‘Heavy defensive fire!’ the Caestus pilot warned.

  ‘Can you reach our targets?’ Guilliman voxed. He stood in the troop compartment of the lead assault ram, the combi-bolter Arbitrator mag-locked to his side, the power gauntlet Hand of Dominion crackling with somnolent power on his left fist.

  ‘Their defence of the upper superstructure is too strong, lord primarch.’ A glancing strike strained the inertial recoil compensation systems. A bulkhead split and a conduit exploded, filling the compartment with flame and smoke. ‘We are making for a gap where the cannons have been destroyed lower down.’

  ‘The journey to the bridge will be much longer,’ voxed Captain Hierax, commanding a squad of Destroyers aboard the second ram. ‘Do we alter the practical?’

  ‘We move faster, captain,’ Guilliman replied. ‘Before the Gladiator is in range of Diavanos, we will take the bridge and decapitate the ship.’ He gave his command the force of law.

  ‘So it shall be, lord primarch.’ Beneath Hierax’s disciplined tone was the promise of a massacre to be unleashed on the World Eaters.

  The hull rang and trembled. Smoke poured into the troop hold as the damage mounted. ‘Angron’s sons are trying very hard to stave off their execution,’ Gorod said.

  ‘If they do not welcome the punishment then they should never have followed Horus,’ said Guilliman. At the back of his min
d, he had been calculating the seconds to impact, adjusting for the change in course, extrapolating the distance to the new target. Now he called ‘Brace for impact!’ at the same moment as the pilot.

  The Caestus ram slammed into the base of the ­Gladiator’s superstructure and its magna-meltas turned the ship’s armour to slag. The hull jerked as if struck by a hammer, the recoil compensators dampening the shock to a mere tremor.

  ‘Now let the traitors know fear!’ Guilliman shouted as Firefury missiles devastated the space before the ram. The loading ramps dropped, and Guilliman led the charge. Explosions still thundered, and at first Guilliman thought the missiles had triggered secondary blasts by striking an ordnance storage facility. But the explosions kept going, and they were coming from above. The muffled crashes were huge. The entire hull rang with them.

  ‘Have we caused that?’ Gorod asked.

  They had arrived in a crew dormitorium. The carbonised bodies of XII Legion serfs lay in a cluster near the doorway to the primary exit. Gorod was not looking at the bodies. He was staring upwards as the brass-engraved ceiling trembled again.

  ‘This is the doing of the enemy,’ said Guilliman.

  ‘Doing what?’

  The explosions went on, gathering strength. It was as if an earthquake were shaking the decks above the Ultramarines. The ship boomed with the sound of terminal collapse.

  Guilliman snarled in frustration. ‘They’re blocking us by destroying themselves.’

  The corridor beyond the dormitorium confirmed his surmise. Both ends were blocked by compacted iron wreckage. The blasts continued, more muffled now, though the hull still rang like a funeral bell.

  ‘They are collapsing all the decks between us and the bridge,’ Guilliman said. The World Eaters knew the Gladiator’s hours were numbered. The ship was going to die, but it would not be turned from its act of final savagery.

  ‘There are vital support systems on those decks,’ said Gorod. ‘They are killing themselves.’

  ‘Does any atrocity surprise you?’ Guilliman asked.