Dark Imperium: Plague War

by Guy Haley

  Mathieu’s resolve to save him grew.

  Up ahead the drifting throng took on the appearance of an official procession, something from Ascension Day, or the feasts of the holy primarchs. To the fore Ecclesiarchical banners swayed. A swarm of servo-skulls buzzed overhead. He smelled incense over the sharp itch of rockcrete dust and the round, musky stink of unwashed bodies.

  All these matters were physical, and that was the lesser part of Mathieu’s world. But there was something else up there, something spiritual. Compulsion had him by the heart, dragging him forwards to whatever glory headed the procession. He shoved his way through, trying to reach the front. He craned his neck as he knifed his way between bodies sealed in embrace by the joy of deliverance. There! He saw. There was a throne of gold at the front. The high back obscured what sat within, but he knew it contained a living body and not some withered relic.

  The girl from his vision was near!

  He pushed and pushed, but so many people were emerging into the battered city that Mathieu found himself unable to proceed further. He was jammed in place by those around him, and his progress was slowed to the collective crawl of the Tyreans. Music came from the front of the procession, and the cries of priests like himself. He could not get any closer. Frustration tainted his piety, but just as he thought he might burst with it, the road came to a tattered end. Bombed-out buildings framed the soaring facade of Tyros’ cathedral, an immense building, fronted by a brazen aquila as tall as the sky. The jam was unstopped, and the crowd poured into a square.

  There was a mound of rubble in front of the eagle. The procession made its way to it, and the throne ascended. It was carried, Mathieu saw now, by Battle Sisters in armour the colour of red wine. He took advantage of the spreading of the crowd to push further to the front, well aware of the mass of people coming from behind. They would soon pack the square as tightly as they did the streets.

  Banners ranked up around the pile. A band played devotional music. The display was threadbare compared to the grand shows Mathieu had seen put on for the primarch, but it was all the more powerful for its sincerity. He caught a glimpse of the girl, soon lost. Grunting with annoyance, he forced himself to a better position. She was too distant to make out clearly, a pale smear surrounded by gold, but it was her. He was sure of it.

  One of the Battle Sisters stood up to the front, and she spoke.

  ‘People of Tyros!’ she said.

  The chattering of the crowd dropped to a murmur, then silence. Even the continued roar of Space Marine attack craft and relief ships seemed muted.

  ‘We bear witness to a miracle!’ she said. The girl sat unmoving in her throne as the Sister spoke. ‘In this city, at its greatest hour of need, has arisen a holy child, a pure girl, a noble girl, a girl of such perfection she is worthy to be a vehicle for the will of His divine majesty, the God-Emperor. Praise be!’ she said. The crowd was quiet still, but from every heart Mathieu felt a holy ecstasy. ‘Through this girl, this war shall be won, and the monstrous traitors, those vile idolators of false and evil gods shall be cast forth from Parmenio, and it shall be made wholesome again! We shall live again! And our lives, though interrupted by hardship and sorrow, shall be all the richer, for we have seen with our own eyes that the Lord of All Humanity, the Master of Mankind, He who dwells in permanent suffering upon Holy Terra for the continuation of the human race, He watches over us, one and all! I have seen this girl turn back the daemonic engines of the enemy. I have seen her change filth into pure water. I have seen her undergo the pains and the questions of my order’s excrutiators without complaint, for she is pure! Within her burns the light of the holy God-Emperor. Within her is contained our salvation!

  ‘Be thankful,’ she said, her voice breaking with the joy of her pronouncement. ‘Be vigilant. Give up your prayers to Him for His mercy. That is His due. Your love, and your service. Give it to Him. Give Him your–’

  And then the girl gave a tiny cry, and raised her arm to point at Mathieu.

  The crowd parted, opening a lane between him and the throne.

  Ten thousand pairs of eyes looked at him expectantly.

  Sicarius set a punishing pace through the city. The Space Marines jogged so fast that Devorus was almost sprinting to keep up. After they passed through the makeshift gate plugging the breach, Devorus began to flag. Without breaking stride, two of Sicarius’ guard locked their weapons to their armour with magnetic clunks and picked Devorus up under the armpits. Complaining would get him nowhere, he saw that before the first protest left his mouth, so he hung limply between them. In shameful silence he allowed the demigods to carry him like the inconvenient human baggage that he was.

  ‘Higher ground,’ said Sicarius to his warriors. Everything he said was to the point. ‘The populace is gathering around the cathedral.’

  Armoured feet pounded chunks of rubble to powder. The Space Marines bounded up along the angle of a hab tower drunkenly leaning on its neighbour. Steep and treacherous was the path, but it made no difference to their stride, and they ran up it at a pace no mortal human could sustain. From their armour sounded the silky purrs and machine growls of hidden effort. Their power units radiated a benign heat. Warm gusts hushed from slatted vents to caress Devorus.

  Angel’s breath, he thought foolishly.

  This was not Devorus’ first time in the presence of the Adeptus Astartes; he was a soldier of Ultramar, and the bond between the realm’s ruling Chapter and its subjects was strong. But he had never been so near that he might touch them, and indeed the act would have been a minor sacrilege to him. He could not have imagined this climb heavenward towards the sky, carried in the arms of angels.

  They reached the top of the leaning block. Sicarius, tireless, leapt from the broken pinnacle, hurtling to the roof terrace of the next building. His men followed, and for a moment Devorus was flying. He looked down into the shadowed canyon yawning under his feet.

  They landed with the hiss of shock absorbers, and ran on smoothly, their leap but another step in their jog.

  Sicarius stopped by the shattered balustrade of the tower. There had been gardens on the terrace, well-mannered shrubs and dignified trees confined in squares of grass, surrounded by the sober beauty of Ultramarian architecture. Chunks of rockcrete were scattered over the paving. The grass was brown, the pools empty, the trees gone to brittle lifelessness, and yet against all odds, good persisted. On one tree a solitary green leaf clung, turning back and forth in the breeze. It held Devorus’ attention entirely. The tree was alive. While it was alive, he thought, Tyros might live again. He prayed it would.

  ‘Major,’ said Sicarius. He pointed his metal-clad finger downwards.

  Devorus blinked. The leaf lost its significance. He had been set down without noticing it. He followed the captain’s gesture.

  They were overlooking the city’s heart. The cathedral dominated the plaza, the twin-headed eagle of battered metal that formed its facade defiant over the rubble. The nave’s roof was collapsed along two thirds of its length, and one of the transept towers had gone into a sandcastle slump. But the eagle stood, noble, hawkish and indomitable, beaks jutting skywards, wings folded around the sides of the cathedral in protective embrace.

  Devorus had watched the plaza die. When he first arrived on Parmenio, it was the epitome of order. It too had its trees and shaded spots where scholam children gathered on sunnier days for their instruction. He had seen the plaza shake under the first of the bombs as explosion unmade artifice. He had seen it lit by defence laser bursts chasing the enemy back. He had watched the bombs crash through the cathedral roof and fill it with fire.

  It looked like another place now, surrounded by eyeless windows and gaping, hag-faced buildings. War scraped away the glory of man’s work, showing beauty for a trick. Marble facings torn, and underneath, the ugly, tedious truth. In a city pounded by war, everything is revealed for what it is: compressed dirt and
dust, hidden under paint.

  The plaza had changed again. People thronged it in the tens of thousands. Emaciated humanity gathered again without fear under the open sky. It was cloudy, but the clouds were of the normal sort that brought rain, and not downpours of filth. The people stood on the new hillocks of shattered rockcrete and tumbled brick, lanterns and candles burning in their hands so they looked like a field of stars guarded by sentinel gods. Upon a throne before the aquila facade was the girl, surrounded by an honour guard of Battle Sisters. The crowd watched her in silence. The war showed its deference to her as much as the people. Explosions and gunfire from Hecatone whispered their destruction. Aircraft sighed apologetically in to land.

  The girl sat, appearing weak. One of the Sisters was speaking. Iolanth? he thought. They were far below, but her voice carried, fine as a hawk’s cry hurried over moorland on the wind.

  Iolanth was talking about salvation.

  ‘This is the girl?’ said Sicarius. His growling voice made Devorus start.

  Devorus could not speak. He was held enraptured. He nodded.

  The Battle Sister had not finished when the girl pointed and spoke. She interrupted as if she had not heard anything the Sister said, but had been waiting in silence while she searched for something.

  Iolanth stopped abruptly. The girl stood and pointed.

  ‘There is one among us here,’ the girl said, her words more felt than heard. ‘There is one among us who comes from the stars and who brings hope.’ Devorus fought the desire to kneel. Doing so would be dangerous in front of his companions, he realised.

  ‘He is there,’ said the girl.

  The crowd parted around a man, leaving him conspicuous. To Devorus he was another speck dressed in tired clothes. He seemed to glance up at the Space Marines.

  Sicarius tensed. His armour amplified his reaction to aggression.

  The crowd parted and the man walked to the mound of stone and the throne atop it. He kneeled before the girl, who reached out and rested a hand atop his head.

  Some feeling emanated out from the girl and the man into the crowd. In rustling quiet, the guardians of the candle stars knelt.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ she said.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ they repeated. A moan of devotion more than words, rich with piety and yearning.

  The man stood. He faced the crowd.

  ‘My name is Frater Mathieu,’ he said, his voice as clear as Iolanth’s. ‘I am militant-apostolic to the Primarch Roboute Guilliman, last son of the Emperor, the Avenging Son, the Lord Commander of the Imperium and Imperial Regent.’ He took a deep breath. Devorus could feel his ecstasy. He wanted to share it.

  ‘I have witnessed a miracle,’ he said. He pointed at the girl. ‘The Emperor is here.’

  Sicarius laughed a bleak laugh, breaking the spell. Devorus blinked unnoticed tears from his eyes.

  ‘The primarch’s going to love this,’ said Sicarius.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Mustering at Parmenio

  There were grand arrivals and there was awe. There were speeches, orders and announcements. Tyros, bowed by war, ecstatic at salvation, reeled with the arrival of the primarch. Two miracles in a single day is more than most human hearts can endure.

  Once the attempts at pomp were done and the ragged finery of Tyros put away, evening rushed its cool cloth over Parmenio’s fevered skin. Then Guilliman found time to speak with his chief officers: the newly minted Primaris Tetrarch Felix of Vespator, and Captain Sicarius of the Victrix Guard, hero of the Ultramarines. Present also were Maldovar Colquan of the Adeptus Custodes, and Sister-Commander Bellas of the Sisters of Silence. There were others who could have been there. Many others. Generals of the Astra Militarum, senior princeps of the Collegia Titanica, magos domini of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and myriad high officers of multiple Imperial Adepta. Most had had their turn at the council called within Tyros’ walls; those that had not could wait. Guilliman needed level heads. Moreover, he needed minds whose sensibilities were uncoloured by religion. Of those upon the wall only Bellas was devout, but the primarch trusted her to leave her beliefs to one side.

  There were too few believers he could call into his confidence.

  For his platform Guilliman chose the flat roof of a bastion tower looking out over the narrow channel between Tyros island and the Hecatone coast that formed the city port. The land on both sides had been shorn of natural shape, forced into geometric patterns of squares and rectangles that months of battle could not erase. But the buildings on the altered coastlines were rubble and twists of metal dropped half in and half out of the water.

  Damage like that was costly to put right. Months would come and go before the docks might be rebuilt.

  Before then Guilliman had another purpose for them. Hecatone’s spaceport was deep in enemy territory. The docklands of Tyros, with their large, flat spaces made for the storage of shipping containers, provided a viable alternative.

  Work commenced to make Tyros docks ready for the muster. Sea port was remade into spaceport.

  Guilliman’s reclamation crews worked around the clock, clearing the far side of the channel. The land was divided into neat quadrants by winking beacon poles. Cleansing teams and chanting priests walked back and forth over these areas, venting steam and prayer into the warm summer night. They wended their way in and out of sight, disappearing behind bomb-shattered warehouses, reemerging from crumpled containers, not straying outside the beacons of delineation until the whole of each box was done.

  The quadrants declared pure were set upon by building-sized construction vehicles, beneath whose dozer blades the land screeched with the protests of metal and the grumbling of ferrocrete rubble being shunted aside. The giant dozers moved slowly, pushing up the detritus of war into embankments around the mustering point. In the quadrants nearest the shore, the rockcrete was planed down entirely, outlines of lost buildings the sole reminders of what had been a thriving port. They were laid bare for minutes only; each one cleansed and bulldozed soon played host to voidships landing and unloading more construction equipment, prefabricated fortifications, and hardened warriors to set vanguard garrisons.

  Over the narrows of the harbour the collective shouts of veteran regi­ments running from their dropships piped under the grinding of the port’s reshaping. The voices came and went, subsumed into the greater noise of vehicles. At perfectly separated intervals all sound was drowned out by roaring ships’ plasma drives boiling the atmosphere. Amid the haulers, troop landers and heavy landers, coffin ships made their teetering descent, always on the verge of toppling, it seemed – like dowagers alighting from unsteady carriages – until, setting tentative pneumatic feet upon the earth, they stopped their wobbling and became giants’ fortresses, opened up their gates, and prepared to usher out their titanic cargoes. Already a pair of Warhounds strutted back and forth at the edge of the docklands.

  Guilliman observed the scene with a critical eye. The air was growing purer by the minute. Jetwash, plasma burn and promethium fumes wafted across the narrows, but the stench of sickness lifted. The harsh smell of man’s technology drove it out. He and his officers removed their helms, breathed cautiously of the tainted air, and found Parmenio’s breath to be sweetening.

  All would have been well, were it not for bad tidings that had reached them hours before.

  ‘We have had further astropathic messages from the Macragge System,’ said Felix. ‘Heavy Death Guard Legion presence confirmed. Ardium has been reinvaded. Macragge is under attack. The Fortress of Hera is besieged.’

  ‘Master Calgar will deal with it,’ said the primarch. His noble face looked more like a carved thing than ever. Only his lips moved. His expression was stern as stone, his eyes fixed on the progress of the muster as surely as if they were made of glass. ‘It is a distraction. I have reviewed the messages. The forces landed there may seem numerous but the
balance is of poor quality. My brother is alarmed at our gains. He wishes to divert me from this place.’

  ‘Perhaps we should split our army, and send a relief force to Macragge,’ said Felix.

  ‘I cannot favour your practical,’ said the primarch. ‘We are aware of my brother’s plan, this corruption of our realm with his daemon clocks and the webs that bind them. Macragge is free of their perniciousness, as you ensured yourself, Felix. We spoil his game, that is all. He makes a goading move.’ Guilliman let his gaze rove over the horizon where fleeing mists were giving up the mountain foothills. ‘Mortarion is here,’ said the primarch firmly. ‘I will destroy him and the invasion will fall apart. Marneus Calgar will hold Macragge. Those are the practicals we shall work to.’

  The daemon primarch’s presence is all over the psychosphere of this world, signed Bellas. His soul infects it.

  ‘He will attack us,’ said Sicarius. ‘Soon.’

  Guilliman’s eyes narrowed, shifting his face from one sculpted expression to another. ‘He withdraws his armies from their assaults on the cities of Parmenio. He will gather his men, march on our position, and throw himself at us. He has not changed. His preference was always for grand manoeuvre and the contest of resilience that open battle brings.’

  ‘Let him come. I’ll happily show him my skill with a blade,’ said Colquan.

  ‘It may not come to close quarters,’ said Felix. ‘Our Titans and armour will decide this fight. Mortarion’s numbers are greater than ours, but his troops are inferior. His warp nexus has been destroyed. The fume of madness is lifting from the minds of the people. Our outer pickets report deserters who have come to their senses and abandoned him. His armadas of tanks are impressive, and I admit the large number of Death Guard here is a cause for concern. Their sum of Adeptus Astartes far outmatches our own, but three demi-legios of the Collegia Titanica are the Lord Regent’s to command. Mortarion has one demi-Legio. Our knights outnumber his two to one. I have word today that Galatan has arrived in system. Once it reaches orbit, the enemy’s fate is sealed. The final pieces are set. We will surely sweep him before us.’