by Guy Haley
‘Yes, sir?’ Doromek gave a coprophage’s smile. The thin man grinned.
‘I heard you, giving all these wretches the benefit of your wisdom. Are you a military man?’ snapped Jainan. ‘Don’t lie to me. I can check. Save us the time and tell me now.’
‘I was once,’ admitted Doromek.
‘And you are again,’ Jainan said. ‘Sir.’
‘Indeed. Sir.’
‘How many years, and what regiment?’
Doromek rubbed at his head. ‘Atlantean Rangers. Fifteen years.’
‘Role?’
‘Sniper.’
‘Good one?’
Doromek waggled his free hand. ‘So they say.’
‘Then how come you weren’t called up in the early drafts?’ Jainan’s eyes narrowed.
Doromek shrugged. ‘Lucky, I guess.’
‘Hiding you mean. Well your luck’s run out. You’re my new lieutenant. Congratulations.’ He stalked off back into the storm, hollering at the group to get a move on. ‘And stop diving into the ground at the sight of every aircraft – they are all ours!’
‘An officer? Me?’ shouted Doromek.
‘Don’t get excited. Acting officer!’ Jainan called back over his shoulder.
Doromek grinned at Katsuhiro. ‘That makes you my first sergeant.’
They staggered on for another few hundred metres. A dark shape loomed out of the snow to meet them. Katsuhiro peered fruitlessly into the storm. The shape grew firmer with every step, until it stopped being a shape and became a great drum tower, a hundred metres tall and almost as wide across, set back some fifty metres from the outermost ramparts. Guns mounted in the walls tracked back and forth across the artificial plateau beyond the aegis. Lights shone through tiny windows in only one place, halfway up the front.
Doromek whistled. ‘I guess that’s Bastion Sixteen.’
Jainan’s vox-amplified voice cut over the rumble of the Imperial guns and the muffled thunder of the bombardment.
‘This is it. Follow me. Our section is to the south-south-west. Stay close. Don’t get lost. There are uniforms, shelter, food and water waiting for you. Alternatively, you can blunder off into this blizzard and either freeze to death or be executed by the Marshals Militaris. I hear they are itching to shoot something. Your choice.’
Jainan strode away. There wasn’t much option but to follow him.
Bastion 16, 16th of Secundus
Afterwards, Katsuhiro was not certain if it was the increasing noise of the explosions or the wailing klaxons sounding from the wall that woke him. Mercifully spared duty, he had fallen into a deep, sudden sleep atop a pile of sacks just as soon as he’d found somewhere to hide.
Tocsins blared all along the ramparts, wrenching him from slumber into nerve-jangling consciousness in the space of a single breath. He leapt up, flailing around. There were no formal barracks for the new members of the Kushtun Naganda. The storage bunker he found to hide in was unlit, and for a moment he forgot completely where he was. He’d lived in the same room for his entire life. Twenty-five years of familiarity sought to impose themselves upon reality, and he stumbled about, wondering who had moved his few pieces of furniture around.
The door opened, catching on poorly finished rockcrete with a squeal. Horrendous noise blasted in from outside.
‘Out, out! The enemy are coming, the enemy are coming! Come on!’ A wild-eyed man he didn’t recognise beckoned frantically. He wore the badly made tabard that marked him out as a conscripted member of the Nagandan; this was the uniform Jainan had mentioned, and not the warm coat Katsuhiro was hoping for.
Who the man was, Katsuhiro never discovered. He found his rifle and ran outside.
The snow had stopped, and cold sunk its teeth deep into the mountains. Although Katsuhiro had been warm in the bunker his clothes were still wet. Winter hit him like a blow, so hard he almost missed what occurred. The sky above him was an eye-watering pattern of unnatural colours holding back an ocean of fire. Something squeaked and ground like ice on stone, then there was a tremendous bang, and the noise of the bombardment suddenly grew loud enough to shake the teeth in his head. There were people shouting all around him, but he could not hear a word they said. Pulsed shocks of overpressure batted at him. The ground bounced like a drum skin. He staggered about in shock, half blinded by strobing explosions hammering the ground a kilometre distant.
Doromek was there, turning him around, pointing and shouting. It took three attempts before Katsuhiro heard what was being said.
‘The voids have come down!’ he yelled. ‘The voids over the Palace!’
He followed Doromek’s finger. He could see it then, a dark space over one of the wall’s enormous towers. The edges of other void shields were visible thanks to the lack of the missing element, layered over one another in flat petals that pulsed like hearts with every impact. They held back their portion of the bombardment, but through the hole shells fell unimpeded, making it down to the ground and exploding all around the tower. Flames burst off the tower’s sloped sides. Katsuhiro tried to ask if they would be targeted next, but nobody could hear him. Warning sirens sang over the explosions, audible only by dint of their shrieking pitch.
The huge defence laser that dominated the tower prepared to fire, the nested barrel pulling itself back with a series of businesslike metallic booms. With a defiant roar and cast of light the cannon uncoiled, hurling its response upwards. Whether the las-beam hit its target or not Katsuhiro could not tell, but at that moment the enemy appeared to notice the section was unprotected, and destruction speared from the night.
Five beams of collimated light slammed into the tower, their impacts tightly grouped, each coming in from a different angle.
Molten rockcrete and metal poured off the structure in torrents. The beams were persistent, and moved along, sawing at the tower. One punched clean through both sides of the building, bringing up a mushroom of fire from within the Palace before they all snapped off. Part of the parapet of the attached wall tumbled away, its sheared edges glowing with heat.
The gun pulled its muzzle in again, but its last roar had already been voiced.
A triple hit of high-velocity mass shot slammed into the spherical turret. Explosions rolled out over the defence works, each one louder than the last. Fire swept out in a hollow disc around the top of the tower, and when it receded the gun was a tumbling wreck, slipping from its moorings and taking the outer face of the bastion with it.
‘Come on! Come on!’ The man who had woken Katsuhiro ran past, his need to act dragging a score of his comrades along with him. ‘The tower, the tower!’
They made impressive speed through the lying snow, though Katsuhiro saw they could achieve nothing and did not follow. Thin screams crept under the noise of the barrage. The heat of the molten rockcrete singed his face from so far away. In their need to do something, anything, the conscripts raced headlong into danger, while others stood rooted to the spot, weeping in terror.
More lance beams scored their way across Katsuhiro’s eyes, coming this time from a lower angle. Half of them smeared away to blue light across the neighbouring void shield, but the rest hit the tower squarely, slicing it open down to the magazine. The largest, brightest fire Katsuhiro had ever seen boomed out, breaking apart the tower as it grew from nothing to everything, so big and loud it swallowed the whole of the universe.
Searing air knocked him flying, sending him skidding metres through the snow. Debris rained down around him, bringing more screams into the night as men and women were crushed.
Gasping for the breath that had been punched from his lungs, Katsuhiro staggered upright onto his knees and remained there, filthy again, his back chilled to the bone by the wind, his front warmed by the dying fires of the tower. Through phosphor-bright after-images burned into his retinas, he saw the tower was gone, a tooth torn out from the root. A single she
ll corkscrewed down on a spiral trail of fire, bringing up a last explosion. The air thrummed. His skin prickled, and the void shields flexed back into existence over the ruin, glowed like the cells in an insect hive, then faded out of notice. A few hits splashed upon the surface of the aegis. The bombardment moved off, on to test the next mighty bastion ten kilometres away.
Doromek found him again.
‘The first gun falls. This is it now,’ he said. ‘They’ll concentrate their fire like that, to take out the biggest anti-ship cannons we have. Little by little, they’ll nibble it away, until there’s nothing left to threaten their landing zones.’
‘Landing zones,’ repeated Katsuhiro dumbly.
‘We’re lucky,’ Doromek said sardonically. ‘I’d say they’re clearing this area here. They’re going to be coming right at us.’
Tears of an Angel
The Emperor’s work
Fabricator General
Imperial Palace airspace, 24th of Secundus
Sanguinius flew under a ceiling of fire. His strong wings bore his armoured form easily over the sprawl of his father’s Palace. Not for the first time, he marvelled at the artifice that had gone into the creation of his wings. Most winged creatures analogous to Terran vertebrates had keel bones to anchor their flight muscles. The ones that did not were gliders, not flyers; they could not beat their wings. For his own amusement Sanguinius had once calculated how far his sternum should project to allow him to fly if he had followed the same design as a bird. Two and half metres should have covered it. Yet he had a human form, with no grotesque deformities. Indeed, they called him beautiful.
Exactly how he was able to fly would have been impossible to determine without having himself dissected. His father never spoke with him about his wings. Sanguinius had often wondered if they were part of the Emperor’s design, or were the outwards signs of Chaos’ blight upon his soul. The servants of the Ruinous Powers had intimated as much to him.
‘They lie,’ Sanguinius said, through gritted teeth, his words torn from his mouth and left behind as he wheeled through Terra’s tortured heaven.
If the Emperor had made the wings, Sanguinius assumed that a musculature of the most inspired design had been incorporated into his body. The wings were broad, and strong, and glorious to look upon. They lifted him and the great mass of his armour easily. He could control his great pinions as finely as fingers, tilting them individually this way and that to catch the air perfectly. When he moved his feathers so, air ran over the barbs like water over a hand. The sensation pleased him greatly.
Sanguinius passed comfortably between the blasts emanating from the Palace defences. His gift of prophecy was stronger than ever before as he neared his foreseen end. The fixed point of his death anchored his ability somehow, the coming seconds, minutes and hours unfolding more readily for him. He knew where each shaft of killing light would go before it cut the sky, and adjusted his flight accordingly. He saw shells spear upwards before they were fired.
Flying was a gesture of defiance. It was sad for him that it had often been so. On mutant-hating Baal before he was found. On Macragge, where he had flown in defiance of Guilliman’s wishes. On Terra now, where Dorn said the same. Always, his brothers sought to ground him.
But he would not stay out of the air. How could any of the others understand him, when none could fly?
He hoped Horus could see him beneath the squalls of energy bursting on the aegis and know he could not be touched.
The Palace stretched beneath Sanguinius, immense in scale, almost impossible to grasp as a whole. Dorn’s defences came close to matching the Emperor’s vision in grandeur. The Eternity Wall ringed the whole, stupendous in scale, thousands of kilometres long, hundreds of metres high, layers and layers of rockcrete, ferrocrete, plascrete and stone, the sloping fronts reinforced with adamantium. The metal alone equalled in value the combined wealth of dozens of lesser empires. In places the walls were stepped with multiple battlements marching up the outside. Hundreds and hundreds of towers punctuated its length, many topped with anti-fleet guns. Orbital batteries occupied bastions the size of hills behind them.
The Eternity Wall spawned many offspring, dividing the Palace into various wards. There was the Ultimate Wall, around the Sanctum Imperialis, and the Anterior Wall, which looped out from the Eternity and Ultimate Walls to form an outer bailey for the Lion’s Gate, girdling the artificial mountain of the Lion’s Gate space port as it did so. Each of the sections of the walls had their own names: Daylight, Dusk, Tropic, Polar, Montagne, Celantine, Exultant, and more besides, so many in number, though still few when divided among the overall length, so that each named section was dozens if not hundreds of kilometres long.
Laid out below Sanguinius were the spires and hives of the Palatine Sprawl. The Tower of Hegemon thrust contemptuously up at the enemy fleet, its existence vouchsafed by Skye, the last of Terra’s great orbital plates, whose straining engines held aloft a treasury of transplanted guns.
Not far from Skye’s anchor the giant dome of the Senatorum Imperialis managed to retain its dignity despite being swaddled in protection. This varied from technologically advanced foams and layers of dispersive and ablative materials to simple piles of sandbags filled with the dust of ancient civilisations. Further out he spied the Investiary, and though all except two of its monumental statues had been destroyed, they and the empty plinths around them were also covered over. These buildings and monuments were too precious, too evocative of the dream of Imperium to be taken down. Removing them would be tantamount to admitting defeat, even if only to keep them safe. But elsewhere, much of the beauty of the city had been trampled on by Dorn’s fortification. Guns bristled on buildings never meant to take them, and what could not be weaponised had been torn down to make way for yet more guns.
Sanguinius circled over the ziggurat of the Lion’s Gate space port, banking to avoid the immensity of the gate itself. Guarding the way to the Inner Palace and the sanctum therein, the Lion’s Gate was the greatest of the Palace’s many portals, an entire mountain refashioned into a fortification. A few dozen kilometres before it was the Ascensor’s Gate, the largest of the Anterior Wall’s six entrances. In any other setting the Ascensor’s Gate would have been a monument to Imperial might. Before the Lion’s Gate it was a child’s model.
Diving fast under the constant thrum of the void shields, Sanguinius accelerated, and he powered by the space port. It was of such stupendous size that its flat top alone accommodated landing fields to rival the chief ports of a sector capital planet. Its sides held docking cradles large enough for major void-ships. Everything about the Palace was scaled for gods. Sanguinius had lived much of his life feeling the world around him to be small. There had been one or two occasions, mostly before the glory of cosmic phenomena, once even at the Fortress of Hera, where he had been humbled, but these things had a lesser effect than the Palace had. In the Palace, he was a mote before the majesty of his father’s ambition.
He turned south-west. Hundreds of kilometres of ancient massif sped quickly beneath him, all built over by the Imperial capital. Mountains had been levelled and valleys kilometres-deep filled during the construction. Away from the Palace to the south, east and west, artificial plains, also geoformed from the most rugged terrain on the planet, reached for the horizon. They ended in the plunge of endless slopes, beyond which lay Kush and Ind. North, north-west and north-east the mountains reasserted themselves, their heads smothered in dirty snow. They were the sovereigns of this world once; now they appeared as supplicants, beggared by their usurper.
Cold winter winds blew from the heart of Eurasia. Sanguinius rode them through flurries of snow. Exulting in his flight, he forgot awhile the bombardment and the war. A fragile calm filled him, and the world shifted. Through his Emperor-given foresight, he saw another time as clearly as the present. The Palace had swollen to many times its size, outgrowing the walls, spreading beyond
its original limits, devouring most of the Katabatic Plains and crawling up the sides of the mountains. What beauty it’d had was gone, yet it was not the ugliness of war, but that of carelessness and of neglect. He saw the familiar landmarks still, swamped by edifices of lesser quality. The Terra of his father was a greening place, a world of wastes seeded with oases and the glint of growing oceans. All that was gone in the future. Everything was grey, and oppressive.
Sanguinius let out a cry, and he fell uncontrolled before he mastered himself, and stretched out his wings again to catch the winds. The Palace as it was now, in his present, reasserted itself, though the vision continued to trouble him.
The Eternity Wall space port lunged heavenwards ahead. The second of the Palace’s in-wall space ports, it was a giant ridge of metal fifty kilometres long, festooned with guns, crackling with void shields, its dry docks and berths enough to hold a subsector fleet with room for more besides. The grand capital craft could never come down from orbit, not without breaking their spines, but there, at the ports at the top of the world, smaller ships ordinarily confined to the void could venture to the surface, with all save the larger classes able to put in. But its honeycomb of quays was empty. Terra’s naval might had been smashed asunder. What vessels survived hid far from Terra.
Sanguinius’ eyes strayed to a sky crowded with enemy ships. He still maintained it was a mistake to send the Phalanx away.
He curved past the Celestial Citadel at the Eternity Wall space port’s southernmost tip. A city unto itself, large as any hive, in better days it was the haunt of void clan emissaries, ambassadors from xenos powers, Navigator houses and naval dynasts. Before the war, the citadel’s uppermost spires had extended beyond the atmospheric envelope and into space. In doing so, they had exceeded the reach of the Palace aegis, and so Dorn had cruelly cut them short, leaving truncated stumps a few hundred metres below the void shield barrier. It was predictably covered with ordnance.
